One member of our team suffers from color blindness, which wasn’t a problem with vex in previous games where the colors were red and blue. These two colors contrast eachother and so he can see fine, the issue comes about with this new game “Sack Attack”. The normal sacks are colored light green and the bonus sacks are yellow. This makes it nearly impossible to see the difference, I know a changing of the color scheme is unrealistic but I just want tournament directors to be more aware and possibly mark the yellow sacks to allow our member to see his sacks. Thanks!
I’m almost certain that you local host’s referees will allow you to mark these sacks with two small circular stickers of a more identifiable color, assuming that won’t affect game play. If you give them a notice in advance, they will very likely be allow some form of an exception; just be sure they are aware ahead of time.
Good luck this year!
Please note that I am not a VEX staff memebr and you should probably move this to this section : https://vexforum.com/forumdisplay.php?f=7
This would probably work just fine. Another way would be to draw markings on yellow sacks with a sharpie. That way they’d be permanent, easy to see, and could never affect gameplay, unless a team has a color-detecting autonomous, which is somewhat unlikely.
An option that would be really cool, would be to have your robot sort the gold sacks from the green sacks. You could have your robot make up for the driver’s color-blindness… (granted, this is pretty hard/design changing, and isn’t a “real” fix, but would be a pretty interesting way to overcome the obstacle.)
This is probably a pretty widespread problem. Colourblindness is pretty common, and it will be especially common among Vex drivers and coaches since they’re a majority male group. A colourblind member of our team (who hasn’t seen the objects “live” yet) has already pointed out that he couldn’t easily see the difference in colour between Sacks and Bonus Sacks in the online game information. If everyone who could reasonably request for bonus sacks to be specially marked were accommodated it would probably affect most events. There will be multiple people at Worlds who have trouble seeing the difference between Sacks and Bonus Sacks.
I agree this calls for a question in the official Q+A about whether and how this will be addressed at Worlds, and whether and how tournament organisers can address it at their own events.
And the GDC should probably try to stay away from green/yellow, green/brown, red/brown and red/green colour-coding schemes (as should everyone).
The way I see it (and you’re free to think that I’m stupid), is that color-blindness is like shortness in VEX. Shorter drivers won’t be able to see the field as well, and may have trouble loading the robot. You can’t strap boxes to your shoes to fix your height; that’s a limitation you have to accept. It’s part of being a good driver. Complaining about this is like saying “Hey, my reflexes aren’t fast enough, this game isn’t fair”. Its a team dynamic that you have to work out, like having a coach who is decent at math in gateway to calculate strategy. Having the robot differentiate color with red and blue elements is pretty easy; I don’t know how hard it will be to differentiate green and yellow.
Has your Team Mate actually seen the Sacks, both Light Green and Yellow in person??
Color Blindness typically follows a Red/Green or a Blue/Yellow blindness, and I know a Guy who has Total Color Blindness ( Monochromacy ). ( he can tell the difference between Black and White TV’s and Color TV’s… The Color are much Sharper… )
The Light Green must have some Yellow in it, but I would expect that under Full-Spectrum Light, that the difference would be noticeable, but very possible under Sodium-Vapor Lights, there might be great difficulty in differentiating between the two colors… Mercury-Vapor Lights might be better for differentiating between the Light Green and the Yellow.
FWIIW, my Dad is Red-Green Color Blind, inherited from his Maternal Grandfather. Luckily for me, since this Color Blindness is Genetic, and is passed on the XY gene, I didn’t get it…
It might be Possible to Fringe the Edge with a Contrasting Color if this becomes a difficulty in determining between the two colors.
The thing is you can just buy high shoes, Why Not? Shortness is not a disability, color-blindness IS. Reflexes and shortness are not good references to compare with color blindness.
Marking the bonus sack with permanent markers should do the trick.
Strapping boxes to your shoes would give an unfair advantage (unless you say you have to be less than x height, at which point things get weird), while marking objects to help differentiation simply puts everyone back on the same playing field (as it were).
Also, it is still possible for shorter drivers to see the fields, while it may be impossible for color-blind folks to tell the difference between bonus and regular sacks.
You bring up an interesting point that it won’t really ever be truly “fair,” but we can still try our best
I am partially colour blind, and personally I thought the green sacks were closer in colour to the grey field tiles. The yellow/gold tiles are really bright and significantly different in colour to the green sacks. I don’t know what it would be like for a fully colour blind person though.
I’m only partial too, and had a less noticeable issue during clean sweep, when I asked one of my teammates why the red alliance had weirdly shaped balls when the blue alliance got nice spherical ones. Apparently they are orange and green, not red and blue…
On the topic of “live” objects, I haven’t seen the sacks in person yet, but the photos/videos from Worlds that I’ve seen are barely better than the online info.
Red and Blue is usually a good mix. Black and White for the special barrels was good too (at least as far as I’ve heard). I guess it will always be difficult to find objects with enough contrast that aren’t red and blue - maybe vex could look into patterning objects as well as colouring them differently?
From the sounds of it we’ll end up marking them in NZ, seeing as we have multiple people who need them. I hope vex will do similar for worlds.
Maybe we need some kind of uniform marking between regions, so that people competing in a different regional/at Worlds won’t be looking for the wrong mark?
sorry hope you find away around it
4886a
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cheers and good luck,
Richard P
Are you considered Red-Green Colourblind?? Your description would indicated that.
The problem is, many people already have bought the new game objects, so they would not be able to change to colors without upsetting many more people.
I dont think colour blindness would be much of a problem considering that there are 98 of one and 4 of the other. I am not colour blind but it seems that there would be alot more of one colour than the other.
Color blindness isn’t exactly about seeing the “wrong” colors per se. Rather that the green and yellow colors of the two types of sacks will look alike making it seem like there are 102 sacks of only one color. Nobody would be complaining if my red looked like your blue and your blue looked like my red. We would both go on calling them by what we know and we would both be able to differentiate them.
Ah, Plato’s allegory of the cave.
I’ve always wondered what the philosophical equivalent to the “individual reality” concept was. Thank you magicode and thank you Wikipedia 