The St. Johns County Public Library System announced recently that they had partnered with EnChroma—inventors of eyewear for color blindness—in order to offer glasses to colorblind patrons at all six of the library’s branches.
The purchase of the EnChroma glasses was funded by a generous $13,000 grant award from the nonprofit Barbara A. Kay Foundation, which will also fund the library’s new “Color Your World” program with free oil pastel classes available to all of their patrons.
One in 12 men and 1 in 200 women are color vision deficient. With a population of over 250,000, St. Johns County, Florida, has an estimated 11,000 people with color vision deficiency.
Red-green color blindness is caused by an excessive overlap in the signals from red- and green-sensitive retinal cone cells in the eye, which causes colors that are normally seen as distinct and different to appear highly similar and confusing.
Common color confusions include green and yellow, gray and pink, purple and blue, and red can appear brown. People with color vision deficiency are estimated to see about 10% of the one million shades that a person with normal color vision can see.