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Science

Euro Coins Test for Color Blindness 50

Posted by michael from the different-sizes-would-have-been-good dept.
Chris writes "Three-hundred million Europeans now have an easy way to check whether or not they suffer from red-green color blindness according to optics.org. Spanish researchers are suggesting that the new Euro coins, introduced in January of this year across most of Europe, could be used as an instant test for red-green color blindness. Color blindness sufferers confuse reds, yellows and greens. Traditional tests to detect deficiency in color vision are difficult to evaluate or calibrate. But in trials comparing 5 cent coins, which have a reddish tone, with 10 and 20 cent coins, which have a yellowish tone, color-blind observers were incapable of separating them while normal observers achieved the operation in seconds."
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Euro Coins Test for Color Blindness More

Euro Coins Test for Color Blindness

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  • Score one for the EU (Score:2, Interesting)

    by photon317 ( 208409 )

    You'd think whoever was charged with designing a new coinage would have been tasked with making sure they are easily distinguishable by all, including older people with bad vision, the color blind, etc...

    • Yeh, it's a great big fuckup.

      They're not as good as british currency for completely blind people either. ISTR that all coins are round, unlike our system:

      small, thin, round, smooth: 1p
      large, thin, round, smooth: 2p
      small, thin, round, rough: 5p
      large, thin, round, rough: 10p
      small, thin, 7 sides, smooth: 20p
      large, thin, 7 sides, smooth: 50p
      small, thick, round, rough: £1
      large, thick, round, rough: £2
    • It doesn't matter. I am not colorblind but I don't pay much attention to colours normally. My desktop is totally B&W... But back to the issue at hand; you can easily recognize all Euro coins by looking at theis sides. They are all differently patterned. So they HAVE thought about this.
    • Besides, I don't hear many complaints from blind people.
    • They are easily distinguishable even by the blind, by size, texture, thickness, and weight. The color derives from the metals used, and that choice is driven largely by other considerations.
    • Denmark's coins are easily discernable by color, size, shape, texture, and sound. Not only that, they're stylish.

      Sweden's notes are distinguishable by size, aspect ratio, and color.

      For nice to look at money, Finland's now defunct Markka was a good example.

      Great for blind, color blind or the disoriented, drunk tourist. The EU money clearly suffers from designed by committee syndrome. The committee should look more closely at the good examples when they have to redo the design of the money.

  • Size. (Score:3, Informative)

    by undeg chwech ( 589211 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @09:57AM (#3863890) Homepage
    It's lucky they're different sizes [ecb.int] then. It would be really annoying living somewhere where the money was the same size and colour!
    • Especially if you can't read. You know, the numbers on the coins.

      That would be a pain, yes.
      • Yeah, but when I'm reaching into my pocket for change it's nice that I don't have to pull it all out to find a quarter.

        It's also nice for coin sorters, of course, which can sift and separate by size.

    • If anyone actually cares, here is a link where you can see the different coins. I'm about to move from the US to Italy so I have to get used to looking at these things. I have a feeling I'm gonna miss the good 'ole US currency.

      Euro coins [ecb.int]
  • you'll also know that you're colour blind when you eventually realise that your local publican has already figured this out and has been short-changing you for the past 6 months.

    This is especially bad for those of us who suffer from colour-blindness, dyslexia, and dyscalculia [bda-dyslexia.org.uk].
  • Wow, I'm glad they discovered this. I mean, finding red and green objects is -So- difficult in this world. Without these coins, we would probably never be able to test our eyesight.

    Is it just me or is there no sense to this?

  • Color blindness testing. (Score:5, Informative)

    by booch ( 4157 ) <slashdot2010@cra ... m ['k.c' in gap]> on Thursday July 11, 2002 @10:41AM (#3864157) Homepage
    Traditional tests to detect deficiency in color vision are difficult to evaluate or calibrate

    Complete BS. There are books [colorblind.to] of standard tests that look for not only the common red-green color blindness, but also several other less common forms. Here's [umds.ac.uk] a cool online version.

    • "Complete BS. There are books of standard tests that look for not only the common red-green color blindness, but also several other less common forms."

      I agree. There are sets of cards you can get where a normal vision person will see one number on a card, while a colour blind person would see another number. There is no calibration involved with a picture on a card, and the only evaluation is whether or not the person saw the correct number. I have looked and such sets cards myself and knew in 1 minute that I was not colour blind.

  • normal observers achieved the operation in seconds

    You mean to tell me that it takes > 1 second for a non-colorblind person to determine color? I must be some kind of color genius.
  • Whatever happen to the other screwup they made, the composite coins with the different inner part. Apparently if you put them in a freezer the middle would fall out! Pretty funny I wish I could get some of those.

    t.

    • You can do the same thing with a Canadian toonie. Just put it in a freezer for a while and pop the middle part out.
    • There are no composite Euro coins.

      You are talking about the newer 10 Franc coin I believe.

      Alex
    • Wow... I guess all those folks who insist on storing their loose change in the freezer are going to be pretty put out about this. (!?)

    • Canadian $2 coin (Score:2, Informative)

      by cheezfreek ( 517446 )
      Actually, this type of thing also happened a few years ago in Canada, with the $2 coin. It had an inner, gold coloured part and an outer, silver coloured part. Coins from the first press could have the middle part punched out fairly easily (without needing to put them in the freezer). You can (and I know someone who does) wear the outer part on a chain around your neck, as a souvenir of the Canadian Mint's ineptitude.

  • Missing the point (Score:4, Insightful)

    by JUSTONEMORELATTE ( 584508 ) on Thursday July 11, 2002 @01:09PM (#3865123) Homepage
    The article wasn't claiming that the Euro was poorly designed. The coins are easily identified if you look at the front, but the flip side (obverse side in the article text) of two coins are strikingly similar in every aspect but red-green hue. Ok, that and the big "5" on the right vs the big "20" on the left.

    From the article:
    The population which is affected by some type of congenital red-green anomaly has been estimated by several authors as 8% of men and 0.4% of women in Europe and North-America [2].

    2. J. Pokorny, V. C. Smith, G. Verriest, A. J. L. G. Pinkers, Congenital and acquired color vision defects, (Grune and Stranton, New York, 1979).

    The point is that the vast majority of the population will never get in to have an opthalmologist evaluate their color vision, but now anyone can perform their own screening with a little pocket change.
    Since one of the causes of R/G anomolies is undiagnosed Multiple Sclerosis, this is A Good Thing.
    • The point is that the vast majority of the population will never get in to have an opthalmologist evaluate their color vision, but now anyone can perform their own screening with a little pocket change. Since one of the causes of R/G anomolies is undiagnosed Multiple Sclerosis, this is A Good Thing.

      MS is a bad thing; I'm against it. But who the hell needs a doctor (or silly coins) to tell them that they're color blind? Coined money is a public service, but that's ridiculous. Ease in differentiating coins should have been higher on the Europeans' To Do List than testing for MS.

      As an aside, this is one of the many things in the news that make me so glad that my ancestors packed up and left Europe a long time ago. Then I read US and local news and wish there were somewhere I could pack up and leave for.

      • Re:Missing the point (Score:4, Informative)

        by JUSTONEMORELATTE ( 584508 ) on Friday July 12, 2002 @10:49PM (#3874992) Homepage
        ... But who the hell needs a doctor (or silly coins) to tell them that they're color blind?

        Most red-green folks don't know, as they've spent their entire lives subconciously developing coping mechanisms. My brother-in-law was well into grade school before someone noticed that he had an odd fascination with red-green combinations. (actually, he had a bloody nose and was watching the blood drip into the lawn. When asked why, he said it was cool to watch it disappear.) Most colorblindness is subtle -- you don't see the world like a black and white movie, you just don't have all the hues that a healthy visual system has.

        Coined money is a public service, but that's ridiculous. Ease in differentiating coins should have been higher on the Europeans' To Do List than testing for MS.

        Nobody ever claimed that the EU designed the coins as a colorblindness test. The researchers here got published for noticing that the diff between the gold-ish-colored coin and the copper-ish-colored coin happened to map onto the red-green area that matters for one type of colorblindness.
  • This seems pretty typical, ignoring the color issue for the momment, you want to be able to put your hand in your pocket looking for a dime and find a dime without pulling out all the coins and sorting. Dimes aren't the easiest to sort from pennies, or at least I get pennies as often as dimes but atleast I can feel and tell that I only have quarters or nickels. So the same size was a poor start. The color comparison is OK only if the coins are new and the user isn't color blind, what are these coins going to look like in 5 years, there is a huge variation between a new shiny penny and a 6 month old one and then as they get older they get very dark, the change in the life of a penny is 10 time the difference shown between the 20 and 50 coins shown in the photo. The idiot that did this should be fired, from a very large cannon, the color of the cannon shouldn't matter ;^).

  • "About the euro design, it is clear that color vision deficient people have not been taken into account."

    For everyone who has already paid with euros, this is obviously nonsense.

    Euro coins can be distinguished by
    • the shape of the edge
    • their size and
    • their thickness
    in addition to the color of the alloy(s) and the number.
    While it may be feasible that euro coins can be used for testing against color blindness, the statement that color-blind or blind people cannot distinguish between coins of different values is to be considered wrong.

    I have to admit that many had problems adjusting to the new currency, but these problems were primarily related to the conversion between values rather than to the new coins and bank notes themselves.

    It might be true, however, that blind (not color-blind) people have problems because every country can design one face of each coin (the other face is the same in all countries). However, about 90-95% of the coins that circulate here in Austria are Austrian euros.

    Having spent a couple of months in the US, I find that US coins are harder to distinguish than euro coins as they are all made of a cupro-nickel clad and thus have the same color (except for the Cent which is made of copper-plated zinc).
    Additionally, the fact that the denomination is not clearly stated on the coins and that they're called "dimes", "quarters" and "nickels" cause a lot of confusion in the beginning.

    As for the statement that the composite 1- and 2-Euro coins may fall apart easily in the freezer, I have to say that some European countries have had composite coins before and that I have not seen any coin where this has happened.

    • ... had no problem distinguishing between Euro coin denominations. As you point out, the edges are quite distinctive and the sizes vary. He could distinguish them, and sort them, in seconds, in like groupings.

      He's not just color blind. :)
      • Does he have a harder time telling apart US coins?
        • Actually the Susan B. Anthony dollars were a bit of a challenge for him. Usually U.S. coins have different weights as well as reeded edges to differentiate between coins of the same size. As an example, the cent and the dime (10 cent) are similar in size, but the dime has a reeded edge, and is thinner. The quarter and the Susan B. Anthony dollar were similar enough in size and thickness to confuse everyone, not just visually-impaired people.

          The Euro coins I have here *I* think were fairly well designed to be easily distinguishable from one another. The one and two cent coins might be a bit confusing, but close your eyes and feel their edges. Use your fingernails. Feel their weight. When you become familiar with their qualities these coins are all quite distinct.

          I suspect that whoever brought up this "issue" is doing a discredit to the majority of color blind Europeans, who one would hope are more clever than those who conceived this "study".
  • I was diagnosed with a red-green color-blindness of moderate severity during my military service. I just couldn't make out the correct numbers hidden in the test plates with dotted images. However, I have absolutely no problems whatsoever separating 5 and 10 cent coins from one another.

    I tried taking the two coins to my hand, shaking them around a bit and then putting them on a table. As soon as I pull my hand from over the coins, I can tell which is the 5 cent one and which is the 10 cent one. I tried this in a few different lighting conditions but the result is always the same.

    The spanish euro coins shouldn't be different from finnish ones, so either I was misdiagnosed or the research is inaccurate. As the plates by Dr. Ishihara are supposed to be a very reliable test, I can't place much credibility on the results of the abovementioned research.

  • Hey, the guy in charge of the EU currency probably thought that they were the same color! ;)
  • But the Euro coins can be most easily distinguished by taste. Really.
    The higher valued coins taste more sweet, but the lowers valued one more salty.
    I'm from Europe - I know what I'm talking about.
  • Has anyone accidentally put one any Euro coins through the wash?

    The gold coins develop this brownish hue and the bronze coins get this weird sheen. Now I'm not one to question our ECB masters, but one would think that they'd have run these thing through the was with a few different washing powders before unleashing them upon us.

    The 5 notes are also crap. They seem to be tearing up very easily.

    --gzl

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