Color Vision Deficiency in Medical Education

A large portion of the population has some form of Color Vision Deficiency (CVD), aka color-blindness. Red-green color blindness is especially prevalent in men, occurring in around 6-8% of males from varying ethnicities (CVD is also common in women, though occurring between 0.7%-4% of women from varying ethnicities) (Birch, 2012).

CVD creates exceptional difficulties for medical students, specifically when content is related to histological specimens whose color differentiation is often minute (Meeks et al, 2016). In addition, many medical schools do not advise students that CVD is common, and so students may not recognize that their learning experience is more challenging than for others (Raynor et al, 2019). A common mitigation for CVD for in-lab work is to provide a grayscale microscope or monitor for reviewing images. However, during a pandemic, students often no longer have access to these in-lab resources.

"Foveolar Cells" by Mikael Häggström, MD. Public Domain (CC0 1.0). Protanopia filter applied using Color Blind Vision Simulator at https://pilestone.com/

Is there a technology resource readily available to students that is easily implemented and user friendly? Yes! Windows 10’s Ease of Access color filters are easily toggled on and can be adjusted to fit various degrees of CVD. This allows students to readily adjust course materials to their visual deficiencies as needed, and also makes them familiar with the deficiency and an opportunity to mitigate. Click on the video below to see how to enable this accessibility tool and examples of its use.

One aspect of CVD in medical education that must be mentioned is its impact on certain disciplines within the field of medicine. For example, a dermatologist must be able to identify skin lesions of different colors. The technology resource listed above will not alleviate the issues experienced when practicing physical medicine, and so medical schools must offer additional resources to students (beyond technological mitigations of CVD) to assist them in their future practice (Raynor et al, 2019).

References

Birch, J. (2012). Worldwide prevalence of red-green color deficiency. JOSA A, 29(3), 313-320.

Elmer, S. (2022, March 27). Color vision deficiency in medical education [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SF52rWRcpw

Meeks, L. M., Jain, N. R., & Herzer, K. R. (2016). Universal design: Supporting students with color vision deficiency (CVD) in medical education. Journal of Postsecondary Education & Disability, 29(3), 303–309.

Raynor, N. J., Hallam, G., Hynes, N. K., & Molloy, B. T. (2019). Blind to the risk: An analysis into the guidance offered to doctors and medical students with colour vision deficiency. Eye, 33(12), 1877–1883. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41433-019-0486-z