Friday, March 29, 2024

Centre Pompidou enhances museum experience for color blind guests

The Centre Pompidou announced that color blind visitors are now able to borrow EnChroma glasses for color blindness during visits to the museum. The Centre Pompidou is internationally renowned for its collection of modern and contemporary art totaling over 120,000 works.

One in twelve men (8%) and one in 200 women (0.5%) are color blind — about 2.8 million in France, 30 million in Europe and 350 million globally. With over three million annual visitors, an estimated 128,000 guests to the Centre Pompidou are color blind. EnChroma glasses will enable color blind visitors to perceive an expanded range of clear, vibrant color in artwork at the museum.

“Always concerned with offering the best visitor experience to all audiences, the Centre Pompidou is delighted to offer people with color blindness the possibility of trying EnChroma glasses, a very innovative device in the museum sector,” said David Cascaro, Director of the Public Division, Centre Pompidou.

While people with normal color vision see over one million shades and hues of color, color blind people see only an estimated 10% of them. To the red-green color blind, colors appear dull and washed out, with some difficult to distinguish from each other. Common color confusions include green and yellow, grey and pink, purple and blue, and red and brown. This can detract from the ability of color blind people to fully experience colorful art.

“We are thrilled that one of the world’s foremost visionaries in arts and culture — the Centre Pompidou — is demonstrating its commitment to accessibility and inclusion for those with color vision deficiencies by loaning EnChroma glasses to guests,” said Erik Ritchie, CEO of EnChroma. “Their example will generate more awareness for the prevalence and effects of color blindness, inspire other museums and organizations to follow their lead, and ultimately expand opportunities for color blind people to more fully experience colorful, iconic artwork like never before.”

The Centre Pompidou is the first museum in France to support the needs of color blind guests via the EnChroma Color Accessibility Program. The program already helps color blind people at nearly 200 public institutions — including libraries, schools, universities, national parks, gardens, tourism bureaus and 80+ major museums — more fully experience colors in art, nature and overcome obstacles to learning. Other museums participating in the program include the Gallerie d’Italia in Italy, the Chau Chak Wing Museum in Australia, Centraal Museum Utrecht in The Netherlands, and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in the U.S.

Special optical filters in EnChroma glasses help color blind people perceive a wider range of colors and to see them more vividly and distinctly. A study by the University of California, Davis, and INSERM, the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research, demonstrated the effectiveness of EnChroma glasses. A separate recent study in the scientific publication Eye-Nature also highlights the benefits of the glasses.

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