Turns out that this isn’t the critical ability required to do well in school. I take your point, I’m sure the monochrome screen would be a challenge sometimes, but literally never the difference between success and failure at the high school level.

I'm sure color blind people are capable of learning too

Colour blind doesn't mean someone sees in black and white. It means they have difficulty differentiating between two colours. Often red / green, but not always.

That is most common, but a tiny minority see no colors.

One in 40,000. Being completely blind is VASTLY more common.

So that's still somewhere between 6600 to 11000 people in the US alone. Assuming a range of 1/300000 to 1/400000 out of 331 million US Citizens...

So while rare, its not impossible to run in to.

That just proves one struggles with a lot of not well thought out assignments, not with all of them. That still means a badly designed book.

I grew up, as most of my friends, using a lot of xeroed exercise books and exercises notebooks. Monochrome copies, of course.

Never saw anyone having issues with that, weather 7 or 19 years old. If a kid struggles with monochrome computer screen, it means his learning materials are designed worse than post-soviet era 25 year old textbook.

BTW. I am eagerly waiting for better availability of eink monitors.

also, they're not the same colour to me in bright sunlight - one is light murky brown and the other is dark murky brown. under fluorescent lighting they are both the same shade of murky brown.

Red green does not mean that you ONLY have problem with those 2 colors. Means you will have problems with ANY color which is composed of some of the 2. Also there are Red/Blue Green/Blue... basically any combination. So relying in only colors is just bad design.

my TI-84 screen took me pretty far

Relying excessively on colour is an accessibility no-go, and it also makes life harder for roughly 10% of colour blind people. Just dont be that stupid teacher and find better methods.

No, only the teacher’s book had colors. The rest of us were looking at the monochrome photocopies ;)

If anything is based solely in color for interpretation, it is not accessible. And has no place in a classroom. In Europe 10% of males have problems with colors. I figure there must be similar in the US.

I guess it depends on the school district. My kids were doing video and photo editing, using and creating spread sheets, using other software and accessing science web sites that I'm sure would be nearly impossible or extremely difficult to run on a monochrome screen.