What Colour is This?

Here is something that only around 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women think about. What colour of route marking tape is the best if you are colour blind? This actually came up for the first time this summer; it seems like most colour blind people just suffer in silence, so nobody had mentioned it until recently. We used to use white but switched to blaze orange (for a reason mentioned below). One of our course flaggers could not see the orange tape at all, which posed a real problem when it came time to take it down.

Colour blindness falls into four main categories: red, green, and blue deficiency, as well as the rarer condition of total colour blindness. Using the app Color Blind Pal (iOS and Android), you can approximate what people with each of the three main types of deficiency see when they look at different colours. Keep in mind that there are variations of each, and some people have more severe colour blindness than others.

SO... take a look at the four rows of tape below. The first is the original, then the rows below show Red, Green, and Blue colour deficiency. Based on that, which colour do you think will be the best, keeping in mind the following:

We don't use green because it blends into forests too well at night
We don't use dark colours for the same reason above
Pure white is great, even at night, but it is terrible if it snows
Oranges and yellows are not great in the fall as they blend into the changing leaves

ICYMI, we're changing our flagging tape colours this year. Stay tuned for more. 😀

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