Seeing Duke in a Whole New Color

David Petersen has spent his entire life figuring out how to compensate for his color blindness. It wasn’t until a routine sports physical in junior high that he even realized he saw the world differently than most. But by then, he’d already learned to take shapes and slight differences in hues into account when looking at road signs or, eventually, working on computer wiring.

Working for Duke’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) help desk, Petersen spends most of his days covering anything from password resets to software and email issues. But earlier this fall, he found himself in the right place at the right time while manning the help desk at The Link Teaching and Learning Center, located in Duke’s Bostock Library on its main campus.

August Burns, business manager for Duke’s Fitzpatrick Institute for Photonics (FIP), was delivering some glasses made by a company called EnChroma to be catalogued and labeled. When she mentioned that they were glasses designed to help with certain challenges posed by color blindness, Petersen perked up and mentioned that he was color blind.

“She offered to let me try them, and I couldn’t believe the difference when I put them on,” said Petersen, who typically sees reds as a faint brown. “I borrowed them for the weekend and walked around in downtown Durham just amazed at the vibrancy of the colors. I could see burgundy red flecks in chipped brick, which was just phenomenal. But my favorite was the stained-glass windows at the Duke Chapel.”

While Petersen plans to eventually buy a pair of the glasses for himself, he’ll also be able to borrow them again from the Duke Library as part of a new accessibility program being offered in partnership by FIP, Duke Engineering, The Link and EnChroma. Any color blind student, faculty or staff member who wants to see if one of the EnChroma glasses designed to mitigate the effects of red-green color blindness could help them with their job, research or studies is allowed to check a pair out for a week at a time.

One in 12 men (8%) and one in 200 women (.5%) are color blind—13 million in the U.S. and 350 million worldwide. Based on those statistics, more than 1,400 students and 900 faculty and staff members may be color blind at Duke University.

Although there are numerous causes for being color blind, it’s most commonly due to genetics. Every eye has a mix of cones that detect and process reds, greens and blues. While some people are missing one of these types of cones entirely, most have trouble seeing colors because two of them overlap frequencies. By far, the most common of these overlaps (98%) is between hues containing red or green, which can cause a range of confusion between green and yellow, gray and pink, purple and blue, and red and brown, with colors appearing muted and dull and hard to tell apart.

EnChroma glasses work by blocking some of this excessive overlap in the red and green frequencies, which reduces the amount that people’s cones activate simultaneously to the same colors.

“It’s a clever application to color filtering that we do all the time in the laboratory,” said Hafeez Dhalla, assistant research professor of biomedical engineering at Duke.

It was Dhalla who first brought the EnChroma glasses to the attention of Burns. The two happened to be standing next to each other at a demonstration table put together as a part of FIP’s annual open house. One of the displays provided filters that allowed only blue colors or only green colors to pass through and asked participants to predict what they’d see when overlapping the two, which is nothing.

Dhalla had his son with him, who also happens to be color blind and has a pair of the EnChroma glasses. He made an off-hand remark to Burns about the company, the glasses and how they work, and Burns decided to explore more about them. After a quick online search, she discovered that EnChroma has partnerships with nearly 20 other universities and institutions to provide rentals of their glasses, and she decided that Duke should have its own program.

It didn’t take long to convince Duke’s administration, which led to the scene at The Link where Petersen got to see the world in a new light for the first time. Seven pairs of EnChroma glasses are now available for Duke personnel to borrow for up to a week at a time. The glasses are designed to help those with deuteranomalous and protanomalous color blindness who have all three color cones in the retina functioning properly, as exemplified by Peterson’s red/brown confusion.

Not everybody has the same response to the glasses, even if they have the same difficulties between colors. The glasses do not deliver 100% color vision and benefit approximately 80% of red-green color blind people. And even among them, results and acclimation times vary. To this point, two other staff members with similar color blindness tried the glasses on along with Peterson and did not see the same level of improvement. And still others might not even want to have their vision corrected.

“My son doesn’t often wear his EnChroma glasses,” said Dhalla. “He says that he likes the way that he sees the world. But he’s also an independently minded nine-year-old boy.”

But there are plenty of people at Duke who could greatly benefit from the program. Colton McGarraugh is a PhD student in the laboratory of Junie Yao, which works with technology that produces inherently vibrant colors. He also discovered that he can’t easily pick out differences in shades of blue and purple when he confidently declared as a child that a purple chair was gray.

As soon as he tried on the EnChroma glasses, the world looked extremely different. Suddenly, blue jewelry, mints and bottles were all clearly different shades of blue. And the imagery used in a research seminar that afternoon was brighter and more colorful than he’d ever imagined.

“There are markings on tools in the lab that I never even realized were there,” said McGarraugh, whose lab has already bought him a pair of the EnChroma glasses to use in perpetuity. “I’ve learned to compensate by figuring out what those buttons do and, for example, changing the colors used for coding in MatLab to the ones I can see the best.

“But the first medical imaging device that doctors learn to use is their eyes. A patient’s skin can be slightly blue or pale, urine can be widely different colors—seeing colors can give a strong indication for a number of conditions. These glasses will make a huge difference to my work.”

Peterson agrees that correcting his color vision will help him daily.

“We have software that tells us what service tickets are open and active, and I didn’t even realize that the information is color coded,” Peterson said. “Being able to see that makes it so much easier to navigate within the software, and it will definitely help with my efficiency.”