Collective Protest
By the end of the 20th century, however, a collective protest came to arise.
A voluntary association of color vision minority against discrimination was founded in 1994. Members exchanged their stories and opinions in the annual meeting and the newsletter named Color Mate Salon (CMS), and called for the correction of public ignorance and misunderstanding on color vision, the abolishment of the mandatory screening test, removal of various barries, and proper assesment of the ability of color vision minorities. Nagata Yoshihiko, the first chairman and a Daltonian physician, courageously challenged authorities of medical academy. The association edited and published Color Vision Abnormality is not a Disability in 1996, which was the first collection of untold stories of suppressed color vision minority and a declaration of struggle to remove prejudice.
In the same year, Takayanagi Yasuyo, a patient-centered ophthalmologist, published an epoch making book, Color Blind: a Constructed Disability, and blamed the practice of screening test without care as a violation of medical ethics and as a major cause of the prejudice among people. She exerted herself to reveal that most of the conventional prohibitions that had been set in the career of patients had little valid reasoning. According to her study, diagnosis by the Ishihara test contained a lot of false, or at least it did not fit, because the charts were too sensitive to judge a person’s fitness in the normal condition of life.
Reduction of the Screening Test
With a trend of those days against disability discrimination, these movements succeeded to move the government gradually to direct universities and companies to delete color vision clause in the procedure of enrollment or the recruitment.
In 2002, the government finally decided to change the regulation that had prescribed the screening test at schools as mandatory, and made it optional. As a result, almost all elementary schools, junior high schools, and high schools abolished the test.
Neglect of Diversity
However, even this historic change was far from a perfection.
First, the protest had to stress on specialist’s false labeling in order to free color vision minority from old ideology.
Second, the institutional reform was conducted by administrative guidance rather than by public discussion.
Third, some positive proposals were lost in the controversy, and the abolition of the screening test became the political single issue.
Thus the reform by the government ended in a negation of the negative, and lacked a positive policy of care or reasonable accommodation. Consequently, there appeared among the public a neglect of the diversity of color vision, and then, a kind of vacuum in reference and consideration.
New Dominant Visuality
In this vacuum, prejudices in non-institutional level of society and restrictions in some field remained with no specified reason. Contrary, some labels of unfitness was added in a few field like computer operation.
Moreover, criticism that schematically charge the screening test as violation of human rights became rather not so convincing, because many color vision minorities themselves at the turn of the century felt greater uncertainty in reading documents and signs with anarchically colorful decoration of letters and marks, or in operating electric tools with impolitically colored lamps and icons.
In fact, it was a new experience in the dominant visuality required in a society that had become more and more colorful mainly through an explosive proliferation of computers.
Advocacy of Color Universal Design
Thus the advocacy of color universal design was started in the first decade of the 21st century.
The foundation of the Color Universal Design Organization (CUDO) in 2004 symbolized the beginning of a new age. Iga Ko’ichi, a Daltonian and one of the founders of the CUDO, published Color Vision Minorities can Change the World in 2011.
The title is perhaps the first example of positive and constructive self-execution of the category. This book is not only a rich resource of suggestion of principles of universal design, but also a manifesto of a new social philosophy that was embodied in the system of CUD certification through monitoring test by registrant color vision minorities of the organization.
Minorities here are neither mere victims nor passive subjects of salvation any more, but active citizens to take part with peculiar individuality.
Social Representation and Re-inscription
But some reporters saw their emphasis on the diversity of color vision from an old perspective, and described the certification system in a wording that interprets it as an attempt of a barrier free in commodities by a benevolent NPO and sympathetic entrepreneurs who welcome the handicapped as consumer.
Ironically enough, even the claims to improve thoughtless coloring that had been found in the emergency warning of 2011 giant tsunami on TV was reported as a grievance of the people with special disability.
These social representations re-inscribed the old image of “color blind”, and reproduced the ocular centrism and the paternalistic logic of protection of the weak.(The Japanese phrase siki-jaku, that indicates color vision deficiency, literally means color-weakness). Instead of realizing the significance of color universal design and redundancy in signs and signals as a public interest, the problem was reduced to the specific impairment in the body of specific group of man.
Exploitation of the Voice
Appropriating the anxiety among the young generation of color vision minority, a group of ophthalmologists have reinforced their insistence on the need of color vision test at schools and the need of patients’ self-control in the selection of job. They advertised their opinion in newspaper, delivered posters of recommendation of the color vision test to schools, and lobbied to urge government and related agents to take effective steps to restart the test for those students who wish to be tested.
A newspaper article took up a case of a young Daltonian who were rejected as a fireman and described his claim as a demand for early color vision test, and did not make any reference to the reason of the rejection. Another article repeated ophthalmologists' report on such cases in the classroom as teachers' false reproach and classmates' teasing about the treatment of color by Daltonian student, and suggested that the abolishment of the color vision test caused these "troubles".
