Colour Vision Requirements of Firefighters

Colour vision requirements of firefighters.

To perform their job safely firefighters must be able to identify colours on industrial gas cylinders, portable fire extinguishers, road traffic signals and several pieces of firefighting equipment. Although good colour vision is necessary we believe that the existing colour vision standard, which bars entry to the fire service to applicants who fail more than two plates of the Ishihara test, i...

Colour-Vision and Colour-Blindness

Colour vision

The immense range of colours that we see belies the relative simplicity of the system underlying colour vision. We see colours because each of the three distinct types of cone photoreceptor in our retinae is sensitive to a different range of wavelengths of light. The L, M and S cones, colloquially called red (R), green (G), and blue (B), are selective for long, middle and short wavelengths, res...

Colour vision

Editorial Colour vision 2006 is an important bicentenary for the Ulster Medical Society. In 806, the Belfast Medical Society was founded and the later formation of the Belfast Clinical and Pathological Society in 853, allowed amalgamation of both societies to form the current Ulster Medical Society in 862. The vision of the early founders of the Belfast Medical Society, was far sighted, and som...

Colour vision: Is colour constancy real?

Colour constancy is typically weaker in the laboratory than it seems in our everyday experience. New measurements using real-world stimuli show that colour constancy is in fact almost perfect, and that several different perceptual mechanisms contribute to achieving it.