The first concern of business is the bottom line. Progressive employers have begun to see that their bottom line is increasingly linked to the visual health of their workers. Color Vision Deficiency, no less than eyestrain suffered by significant numbers of the workforce who sit for long periods at a computer screen, can impact negatively on productivity and the bottom line.

Responsible employers should be aware that a number of their staff will have a color vision deficiency. Depending on the nature of their business, they will need to consider carefully whether visual testing of employees is worthwhile:

whether more sophisticated visual testing should be instituted if any changes have been made to the working environment.

whether, in addition to pre-employment checks, a procedure should be implemented for testing existing staff. Acquired color vision deficiency can result from a large number of life events, including eye disease, age and medication taken. Any change in an employee's ability to discriminate between colors can have serious consequences both for the individual concerned and for the company.

whether they are opening up their companies to liability claims (redundancy payments, for example) if, subsequent to being offered employment, employees are found to be incapable of performing their work to the required standard.

The costs to a business can be high if they don't institute adequate visual screening for their staff. Obviously, those employers whose businesses demand very fine discriminative ability carry out stringent pre-employment and post-employment checks. These would include the paint, paper and textile industries, and transport where passenger safety would be endangered by failure to distinguish color-coded signals and navigational aids.

However, despite the potentially disastrous consequences of failing to check for color vision deficiency among their staff, many employers have been hit hard financially by workers' misidentification of color. Even in the electronics and electrical engineering industries, where safety considerations are paramount, instances have been recorded of resistors being color coded incorrectly and, as a consequence, the cost of a day's production being lost.

In industries where safety-critical color decisions are not involved, color misidentification can be equally costly. The manufacture of carpets and rugs is a color-critical industry. A length of carpet, woven with just one thread which falls outside the acceptable variation in the color tolerance, is a very costly mistake, as is the picking of large quantities of fruit by fruit pickers with the red/green and commonest form of color vision deficiency!

The above are the more obvious costs to employers. However, there are a number of hidden costs to businesses which can accrue from leaving color vision deficiency undetected. Where color blindness is not safety-critical, it can still be very important as a contributory factor to reduced work performance and lower productivity.

Color-deficient staff may take longer to perform tasks which involve searching for and sorting information, particularly since color coding has become much more widespread in the workplace. Although instruments for color matching have been introduced in recent years, the human eye is often required to be the ultimate arbiter of good color recognition.

Not only do color-deficient individuals tend to work more slowly than their colleagues with normal color vision, but they may also have to seek help from other employees when it comes to completing some color tasks. This works to the detriment of their colleagues' work performance and efficiency.

So what can employers do? They might consider the following:

Increasing ambient lighting levels in the workplace as this helps color-deficient individuals to discriminate better between different shades.

Redesigning the workplace to replace color-coding, which is the sole means of conveying information (e.g. electrical wiring), with color codes which are of secondary importance (e.g. business files).

Obviously this applies to non-safety-critical industries. However, modifications of machinery to accommodate the specific needs of color-deficient workers can considerably enhance work performance and increase productivity. Again, it is analogous to the slower focusing of the eye muscles associated with computer fatigue.Slower performance costs money.

Preparing a comprehensive color vision testing program. This is particularly important if machinery and/or the work environment generally cannot be modified, or if good color discrimination is still necessary. Such a schedule should include a breakdown of the tasks where color recognition is important: the acceptable level of color impairment for any particular task; further testing for borderline cases, and accurate recording and communication of results to management.

This might seem a costly and time-consuming procedure. Many progressive employers, however, are deciding that it's a procedure they can't afford not to adopt.