It was mid-October and Seth Heyer, 14, was traveling with his dad from their home in Calvert County to Montgomery Parks in Wheaton to do something he’d never done before—see the full color variations of the trees at the park.
Heyer is color blind, which means he cannot differentiate between certain colors, but thanks to special eyeglasses available at Montgomery Parks, he can. In October, Montgomery Parks became the first park system in Maryland to offer the glasses to visitors at the Brookside Gardens at 1800 Glenallan Avenue.
“I’ve always wondered what the world looks like to him. He might be seeing things duller and more depressing than the rest of us see them,” Seth’s father, Chris Heyer, said as he remembered how emotional he was on the morning he took Seth to the parks and while trying on the glasses. Heyer recalled Seth saying “I had no idea everything was so beautiful. I had no idea that grass was so green.”
EnChroma, a California-based company that develops eyeglasses for individuals with colorblindness, uses technology and optical filters to enable individuals to see an expanded range of colors more vibrantly and clearly.
“Most people aren’t aware how common it is,” said Kent Streeb, Vice president of Communications and Partnership at EnChroma. The EnChroma Color Accessibility Program helps schools, universities, museums and state and national parks purchase or loan glasses to colorblind students or visitors.
According to the National Eye Institute, people with color blindness have difficulty distinguishing specific colors. Typically, this disability runs in families, and there’s no cure, but special glasses or contact lenses can help people see differences between colors. The most common type of color blindness makes it hard for individuals to differentiate between red and green, but others have trouble with blue or yellow, which look the same, according to the institute. In rare cases, people have complete color vision deficiency, meaning they don’t see color.
A recent study by University of California, Davis, for EnChroma, reported that there are approximately 13 million colorblind people in the United States and roughly 263,000 reside in Maryland. Additionally, one in 12 men and one in 200 women are Color Vision Deficient (CVD), suggested the study.
“We heard about the glasses a couple of years ago when they started popping up in museums, art exhibits, and national parks,” Jennene Blakely, Montgomery Parks Program Access Manager said. So, we thought it would be incredible to provide this equipment in our parks and now, since October, it’s available for everyone.”
Their priority is to remain committed to providing a safe space that is accessible and inclusive for all guests. “We are hoping to educate our Maryland community about all the services and equipment we have for people with disabilities,” Blakely said.
Mike Selckmann, 35, an aquatic ecologist from Frederick who was diagnosed with colorblindness in seventh grade, recalled his first experience with the glasses at the park on Oct. 15 too.
“[I] got to see a lot of colors that I hadn’t seen before; particularly the red colors,” Selckmann said. “I was surprised to see the red berries on a bush and the contrast between the green and red trees.” Selckmann said. “Now that I’m walking through the woods, I can see that one tree is glowing in a different way than the other.”
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