Driving with Achromatopsia


Driving is an essential part of our everyday lives, enabling us to travel freely. If you suffer from any form of achromatopsia it is likely that your overall vision, i.e. peripheral vision and fields of view will be fine, but you may have some mild visual loss. It is not these problems that are the biggest factor in your ability to drive.

The determining factor is the degree of colourblindness from which you suffer. As you will be well aware, on all roads over the world we use colours such as green to indicate when it is safe to proceed and red when it is not. Coloured lights are also used in brake lights and some new road signs, so the problems arises when you cannot distinguish between any of these colours. As you can imagine, if you cannot tell whether the light is red or green you would be in great danger of hurting yourself and others.

Unfortunately if you suffer from complete achromatopsia there is little in the way that can be done to help you keep driving. In these cases it is somewhat safer to use public transport. However if you suffer from incomplete achromatopsia, using different coloured lenses can help you to continue driving. Depending on the colour vision you have, your optician will give you some contact lenses that help you to distinguish between the different lights when you are on the road.

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