According to The Argus (March 31), Brighton and Hove City Council is celebrating its success in a programme called Just Right that helps children with autism.

It uses colour zones to help them understand the emotions that they are experiencing and how they can go about managing them.

Unfortunately, to my mind, there is a snag in the way that it has been designed that will cause confusion, and hinder rather than help some of the youngsters involved.

The problem is it that two of the colours being used are red and green, and eight out of every 100 of those involved with this scheme will not be able to perceive them correctly because, like me, they are colour blind.

We hear a great deal nowadays about the help that is available for disabled people but this, in my experience, never extends to those who have a deficiency when it comes to colour perception.

Nobody seems to take it seriously.

On learning that you have this problem people usually just start asking what colour you think various items are and, on the whole, seem to think it all a bit of a joke.

A joke that the Army did not find funny when I broke a small telephone exchange by wiring it up incorrectly. My military career came to a blinding halt shortly afterwards.

There are many colours that we can see correctly but, whenever people are designing things like this autism programme they invariably, for some unfathomable reason, insist on using red and green.

Just to give an idea what being colour blind is like, the green of a traffic light looks, to me, like a mixture of white and blue and I can see very little, if any, difference between red traffic lights, amber traffic lights and orange street lights (and before someone asks how I manage with driving, I don’t.) I have, in the past, written numerous letters to publishers who always use red and green when printing maps and diagrams but I have never, ever received a response.

I can only assume that they cannot grasp what being colour blind is like, and fail to understand that it is something that affects people for the whole of their lives.

It is extremely frustrating that nobody seems to take it seriously, or be prepared to make any changes to the way in which they use colours.

If they did it would make such a difference to the lives of so many colour blind people.

Eric Waters
Lancing