Peabody Essex Museum Delivers Vibrant Display To Color-Blind Guests

SALEM, MA — A new accessibility program at the Peabody Essex Museum is seeking to open a vibrant new world of art to those who deal with color blindness.

The historic Salem museum on Thursday launched the program by offering five color-blind individuals the chance to view galleries using special EnChroma glasses to enjoy the full experience of the artwork.

The PEM will now make the glasses for color blindness available for guests to borrow year-round. One in 12 men and one in 200 women are color blind — which equates to 300,000 residents in Massachusetts and 13 million people across the United States.

Kat Maus, a 38-year-old illustrator and small business owner from Beverly, said her color blindness makes her second guess "every single choice I make" but that she was hoping "my eyes will be opened to all the colors that really exist in nature."

"I'm hoping they give me some confidence in my color choices and abilities as a painter," she said. "I would love to see New England in the fall with its brilliant foliage."

Salem 45-year-old small business owner Daniel Fury said: "In some ways, it's a little scary to think just how much I've been seeing things different from everyone else but I would most definitely like to know."

Maus and Fury were among the five people who got to try out the glasses at Thursday's launch.

The PEM is one of more than 400 museums, tourism organizations, universities, state and national parks, libraries and other organizations participating in the program in which EnChroma donates a pair of glasses for each pair an organization buys to lend to the public or students.

EnChroma glasses are engineered with special optical filters that help people with red-green color blindness see an expanded range of visible colors. EnChroma glasses are not a cure for color blindness, work for eight of 10 red-green color blind people, and results and reaction times vary.

(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. X/Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)