Colorblind Kansas boy tries to see colors for first time

WICHITA, Kan. — When Seth Ogden, 8, was at his grandparents’ house as a kid, his grandma asked him about the roses in her yard.

“I thought she was joking with me,” Seth said. “Once I got closer I could see the roses.”

Seth is colorblind.

So Seth and his mom, who live in Wichita, Kan., recently put together a YouTube video for a contest run by EnChroma, a company that claims to have created glasses that can help people like Seth see color.

In the news release about Seth, an EnChroma employee described life with colorblindness like this: “To them, the world appears gray, dull and washed out. In school, color-coded social studies maps and other information is a muddle of gray.”

His mom, Heidi, says this means Seth will mismatch clothes or confuse soccer jerseys. But she worries that it’s one of the reasons he has never liked doing art.

Color vision activists refer to Seth’s condition as “color vision deficiency” rather than colorblindness because people like Seth can see most basic colors, typically between 10,000 and 100,000 colors in total. Most people can distinguish 1 million colors. The world doesn’t appear gray to people like Seth, but when colors are close together he struggles to tell the difference.

Seth won the contest for EnChroma lenses and the company sent him a pair of its color-correcting glasses, which typically retail for hundreds of dollars.

Earlier this month he tried them on for the first time.

“Whoa,” he said almost immediately, with his parents looking on. Everything was golden, he said, as the sun shimmered through the branches of trees that had lost their leaves for the winter.

Seth and his mom first heard about the glasses by watching YouTube videos, some of which have hundreds of thousands of views. A lot of the men in the videos went out to beautiful places in nature. They also cursed when they first tried on the glasses, so Seth’s mom reminded him ahead of time that that wouldn’t be necessary.

His parents asked if the greens looked greener. “A little bit,” he said. “The sky looks a lot different.”

Although the sky was full of many colors at sunset, it was mostly blue, a color Seth shouldn’t have trouble seeing without the glasses. He walked over to a bush behind his house and, in a rush of excitement, said he could see berries on it that he’d never seen before.

Seth walked around his backyard, looking at grass and leaves, bird-feeders and plant pots. At one point he picked up a dead leaf and said he saw speckles of red in it that he hadn’t seen before. The dried leaves on the trees looked like clumps before but now looked distinct, he said.

His mom gently asked him whether he could see one color or another, and often he said he could, though not always. At one point Seth said that orange looked much brighter with the glasses on and his mom laughed with affection, because the sunglasses make everything look a little darker, she reminded him.

“What color is the umbrella?” his parents asked.

“It’s green, kind of a dark green,” Seth said.

“What color does it look without the glasses?” they asked again.

“It still looks green,” Seth said. He decided that he’s just better at seeing green than red, regardless of whether the glasses were on.

When Seth’s grandpa, who is also colorblind, found out about the glasses, he wasn’t impressed. “I’ve been colorblind my whole life,” he said.

Before heading back inside, to a regular Friday night of finishing homework and playing video games, Seth said the glasses helped him distinguish colors but the colors didn’t “show out” as much as he had expected.

Still, it was exciting that, given the choice between the glasses and an expensive new PS4 game system, he would choose the glasses because, well, his family already has an Xbox.