Recently on a Thursday night televised football game, Nike outfitted the Buffalo Bills all in red and the New York Jets all in green. Besides looking like a Christmas game in November, a certain segment of the population had a hard time figuring out which team was which because they have red-green color blindness.
The inability or decreased ability to see color or to perceive color differences under normal lighting conditions is known as color blindness or color vision deficiency. In some countries, those who are color blind are denied a driver’s license because they cannot properly recognize color-coded signals such as traffic lights.
Can you be a truck driver if you’re colorblind? No. It’s one of the main physical requirements of truck drivers– you cannot be colorblind. Vision-wise, truckers need at least 20/40 vision with glasses or corrective lenses and a 70-degree field of vision in each eye.
Does this make sense? Yes. After all, truckers are driving giant machines down the roads and highways of America. They need to have top-notch eyes in order to see and react to everything around them in order to be as safe as possible. A colorblind trucker might not be able to distinguish the difference between a red light and a green light, resulting in a tragic accident.
Colorblind individuals are prohibited from certain professions that involve being able to tell the difference between colors. Jobs involving aviation, working with heavy machinery, and, of course, driving jobs are all careers where workers must be able to interpret colored signals or warnings.