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47474| O akville B eaver | T hursday,June 14,2018 insidehalton.com PLEASE CALL 905-337-8776 OR VISIT OURWEBSITE AT www.ateendrivers.ca FOR COURSES INFO AND REGISTRATIONS. AAA TEEN DRIVERS, MTO APPROVED BEGINNER DRIVER EDUCATION COURSE $424.77 +MTO FEE + tax = $499.99. ($100 OFF THE REGULAR PRICE) Class Room Instructions onWeekends, Weekdays, School Holidays and LongWeekends Individual Driving Lessons G2 and G Road Test Packages LIMITEDTIME OFFER 407 Speers Road, Suite 213, Oakville SP EE RS RD M ORDEN RD PI NE G RO VE RD DORVAVAV L DR 1 HOUR LESSON AND G2 ROAD TEST $155NO TAX 1 HOUR LESSON AND G ROAD TEST $170NO TAX 905-337-87766 There were no eureka moments, but there were some pleasant ones. As the world went about its business, four people and accompanying family members converged on an optometrist's office in north Oakville Thursday morning for a potentially life-altering experience. One by one, the four, in- cluding Oakville's Jack Sansone, tried on a pair of EnChroma glasses, de- signed to help those with colour blindness distin- guish colours and see them more vividly. To those who are colour blind, the world can appear dull; it's chal- lenging to decipher colour codes or read traffic lights and avoid fashion faux pas. There can be socially awkward moments, said Dr. Jeff Goodhew, who op- erates Abbey Eye Care with his partner and wife, Dr. Ti- na Goodhew. Abbey Eye Care was the third optometry office in Canada and the first in On- tario to sell the EnChroma specialty eyewear. "Over the years, I had more and more patients travelling to the U.S. to try the glasses and reported back to me that they really appreciated the difference it made to their colour per- ception so we reached out to EnChroma and request- ed to be a retailer." In the past two months, they have sold about 30 pairs of the glasses. Sansone, 45, knew as a kid that he was colour blind but didn't fully compre- hend what it meant until he was tested. "I applied for the police force and badly failed the colour vision test and thus could never be a police offi- cer," said Sansone. When his girlfriend says the "leaves are so beautiful or the rainbow is amazing, you kind of feel like you're missing out but I don't know any different." "I've also been to Hawaii and everyone said the scen- ery was so beautiful, but I couldn't see what they saw. I always confused my col- ours as a kid and teen but never really knew the se- verity." "I think I am more excit- ed than him because I know what he's missing," said his girlfriend, Edel Padilla. Having slipped on the glasses, Sansone slowly took in the room, specifical- ly the props of colourful bal- loons, flowers and Rubik's Cube, under the watchful eye of Abbey's optometrists and his girlfriend. "I see a difference there," said Sansone as he stared at the Rubik's Cube with its vibrant red, blue, yellow, green sides. "I think it's taking time, but it's starting to adjust. When I first did this without glass- es, it was very difficult to tell red and green (on the Rubik's); now it's starting to get darker and darker, the green especially. I can tell them apart now, where- as I couldn't before; it was very blended." Jeff was not surprised that there were no "crazy over the top/OMG mo- ments which you see on the internet," from the four participants. "In fact, when custom- ers come we have to reset their expectations. But af- ter a few minutes of wear, some interesting things start to emerge; new col- ours are seen, reds are more vibrant, sometime or- ange or purple is correctly identified for the first time. It's almost like some folks have sensory overload and they need time to process this new colour informa- tion and they need to re- learn new colours. But 90 per cent of folks who come in end up purchasing the eye wear." With his glasses, San- sone said he would like to go to Niagara Falls to see a rainbow over the Falls and perhaps take in a Toronto Raptors game, "especially if they wear their red uni- forms." The most common form of colour blindness is a red/ green deficiency, said Jeff. "If people have a defect in the green cone in the reti- na, then they are deutans; if they have a defect with the red cone in the retina, they are a protan. So, folks are typically deutans or pro- tans and within that, to complicate things, folks can be mild, moderate or severe, so there is quite the variation or spectrum of colour blindness." If you would like to "see" how those with colour blindness view the world, download this app on an iPad or iPhone, which en- ables you to point at any colourful object and then press one of the buttons to compare what the object looks like to a colour blind person with deutanomaly or protanomaly: http:// asada.tukusi.ne.jp/cvsim- ulator/e. Visit this link to find the EnChroma colour vision test: https://abbeyeye- care.ca/enchroma. NEWS Oakville man hopes to experience a more colourful world KATHY YANCHUS kyanchus@metroland.com