Colorblind Museum Visitors Can Now Use High-Tech Glasses to Experience Art as They Never Have Before

For years, activists have lobbied for greater accessibility to
museums, including improved accommodations for those who use
wheelchairs. Visitors have brought suit against museums from Florida to Califonia for violating the 1990 Americans
with Disabilities Act (ADA), while in the private sector, dozens of New York galleries have been hit with
a lawsuit claiming that their websites are not equally accessible
to the blind or visually impaired.

Now several museums, with the help of Berkeley, California
company EnChroma, are working to accommodate the colorblind—a group
that is not itself included in the ADA—by providing specialty
eyewear that allows them to see a broader range of hues. Optical
filters in the glasses “remove wavelengths of light where the red
and green cones have an excessive overlap” in color-deficient
people’s eyes, as EnChroma explains it, so that those with
red-green colorblindness can perceive new levels of color.

EnChroma makes the glasses available at reduced prices to
museums, science centers, libraries, and school systems. Various
models list at between $250 and $450; the company provided the
glasses to the MCA Denver at no cost. Several art museums around
the world have participated in the program, including the Georgia
O’Keeffe Museum, in Santa Fe; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, in
Kansas City, Missouri; the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art,
in Arkansas; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and Centraal
Museum in Utrecht, The Netherlands.

This week, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver became the
latest institution to provide the eyewear to visitors. The MCA is
offering four pairs; at the inaugural event this week, three
colorblind museum staffers and a colorblind museum visitor tried
them on.

“One of our colleagues here was visiting the Georgia O’Keeffe
Museum, and she and her husband saw that there was a partnership,”
said Nora Burnett Abrams, MCA’s director, in a phone conversation
on Wednesday. “Knowing that we had a couple of people on staff who
experience colorblindness, this was kind of a no-brainer.” Asked
how she knew about her colleagues’ colorblindness, Abrams said that
given the museum’s “intimate” offices, “we know a lot about each
other.”

So, what was it like to watch art lovers experience a whole new
dimension of color?

“To see them see the world anew, it’s not a commonplace
experience to have,” said Abrams. “Everyone put their glasses on at
the same time and there was silence, and I thought, Are they not
working? In fact, they didn’t have a vocabulary yet to talk about
red and green. There was no foundation from which to express what
they were experiencing, just stunned facial expressions. Then they
started to say ‘Wow!’ To bear witness to that is not something we
get to do all the time. I feel very proud.”

Some 350 million people around the world live with
color-deficient vision, says EnChroma—one in twelve men, or 8%, and
one in two hundred women, or just .5%. Inventor Don McPherson
discovered the glasses’ capabilities by
accident in 2002. He was testing eyewear he invented to protect the
eyes of surgeons during laser optical surgery, and wore a pair to
an Ultimate Frisbee game. A colorblind teammate tried them on, and,
looking toward the orange cones marking the boundaries of the
field, cried out, with a highly apposite choice of words, “Dude! I
can see the cones!”

Abrams said that it’s rare for a contemporary museum to end up
on the local news, but when people in the area heard about the
glasses, they showed up early.

“Our first visitors at the door this morning had seen the news,”
she said. “A gentleman brought his father, who is in his late
seventies, and he had never experienced the full color palette
before. He was in tears.”

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Glasses to Experience Art as They Never Have Before appeared
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