Museum offers glasses for visitors with color-blindness to experience art differently

Color blindness, a common visual impairment, can impact daily life and make it hard for art lovers to fully appreciate certain colors. To address this, the Portland Art Museum has introduced special glasses for patrons with red-green color blindness, according to Here is Oregon.

Visitors to the museum can borrow these EnChroma glasses to enhance their experience with color. The Portland Art Museum is the first in Oregon to offer this service, though other places in the state, like Sandy and Lincoln City, have introduced tools to help people with color blindness enjoy colors more vividly. The city of Sandy was the first one to install color blind-adapted outdoor scenic viewers for looking at Mount Hood in 2020 as per the source. Lincoln City also purchased nine pairs of glasses that can be accessed by people who visit Lincoln City Community Centre.

The glasses work due to a very specific feature. The lenses have a light filter that increases the contrast between reds and greens and allows people to experience the two colors and their varied tones more precisely. They can't cure color blindness but allow people to see more hues of red and green with an increased accuracy. They cost between $200 to $400 a pair. In a video, Jason Le, a Kress Interpretive Fellow at the Portland Art Museum, expressed, "A lot of my job is curation and art analysis and looking at art constantly, every day. I think a lot of people experience art in completely different ways, and that’s one of the beautiful and powerful things about it." Le revealed that he had become aware of his color blindness at a young age.

"I remember my teacher coming up to me and being like, 'Oh, the grass that you colored is brown,'" Le shared. "And I was like what do you mean?" He added, "I am mostly nervous because I can't wrap my head around the idea of having a lot of color shifts becoming detectable to my own personal vision." He also pointed out how it is exciting as he can revisit a lot of his favorite works. The man looked at the "Portrait of Infanta Maria Ana de Austria," which is one of his favorite works and features a princess in a bright red gown. "I didn't think I could see such vibrant reds. It enhances the opulence of her dress. I can see a lot more shifts in the colors that I don’t think I have noticed before."

"It makes me want to keep looking at it for a really long time," Le continued. Daniel Laus, a 13-year-old Portland student expressed, "At first, everything looked very red, like everything was red. Now that my eyes are adjusting, the reds are still very vibrant, but everything else seems like their normal color." Russell Read, a museum visitor with color blindness noted, "Part of it literally looks gray, now in red here, wow." Read said as he tried on the glasses. "It just pops." Stephanie Parrish, the director of learning and community partnerships at the museum stated, "If these glasses help remove a barrier, that is what we are trying to do."