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49-year-old journalist and television host Bruce Toussaint confided in Télé 7 jours on how color blindness leads him to organize his days and his show.
Around 4% of the French population suffers from color blindness, a vision anomaly affecting color perception. A disease well known to Bruce Toussaint, who was diagnosed as color blind during adolescence.
A “visual handicap” in everyday life
The television host – who has been waking up the French for almost two years on his show “Le Live Toussaint” – confided in Télé 7 Jours on how he organized himself at work with this “visual handicap”.
“I always wear the same thing: dark suits, blue or black, and a white shirt. The concern, rather, for someone like me who does not distinguish colors well, are the maps projected on the screen. If it’s gray or pink, I can’t tell the difference“, he indicated, thus preferring not to put”red jacket on air.”
He also reveals to be particularly annoyed when a geographical map is displayed on the board. “I can be very embarrassed, and I have to be careful not to misinterpret what I see”.
A visual anomaly, which does not however prevent him from carrying out his professional career and his personal life, he who is married and father of two children.
Color blindness is a vision defect that causes difficulty in distinguishing certain colors. Often reduced to a simple confusion between red and green (congenital dyschromatopsia), it actually takes on various forms.
Color blindness is therefore manifested by a misperception of colors :
- People with normal vision are “normal trichromats“, that is, they have the three types of cones and see all the colors ;
- While color blind people are dichromates : they do not have only two types of cones, usually blue and green. Therefore, they perceive only three hues : blue, yellow and an intermediate shade of white or gray. The absence of blue or green cones is much rarer.
Exceptionally, two or all three types of cones may be missing, the person then seeing in black and white. We are talking about “monochromatism” or “achromatopsia”. Conversely, sometimes the cones are present but do not perfectly transmit the signal corresponding to their color, which leads to a mild color vision impairment. Affected individuals have aabnormal trichromatism”.
The symptoms are multiple, and different depending on the cones present in the eye and their ability to function normally. However, they are usually manifested by:
- Difficulties on the road (perception of traffic lights, crossroads, etc.);
- Difficulties when dressing (a person with color blindness may, for example, wear socks of different colors);
- Difficulties in recognizing a person (color of eyes, hair, clothes, etc.) or certain foods (rare or cooked meat, color of fruits and vegetables, etc.).
It is often those around them who first notice these difficulties in the person with color blindness. Various tests can then be used to make the diagnosis.
Slide: Color blindness test: can you recognize the celebrities behind the dots?