Visualization training: a small oddity

I notice a small oddity in visualization training: and that is that the student isn't taught the colors of the individual squares! There's no training for that I mean. Few minutes ago I went online and train it on a website for that. I wonder at what ELO rating a player knows the colors by heart and fast.

I remember doing those drills. I tend to remember them, not individually, but by diagonals.

EG a4 is white and I know this because Qa4 can be played by the white queen (from d1). A1 to h8 are all dark squares and h1 - a8 are all light squares. I found that this way is far easier than trying to memorise which colour each square is.

Yeah, you need a reference point to begin with, but in the end one is not allowed to calculate them, or "reason" them into place, but to see (!) them.

A hint is this quote from month 3:

Visualization Month 3 PDF wrote:When thinking to the exercises, try to visualize the board. Do not do this way: counting down or up the files and ranks (as in this example: bishop c2 + 1,1 = d3 + 1,1 = e4...).

No, that's right, you can't use that kind of calculation to arrive at the answer and claim you "know it".

But first comes learning diagonals. To work that out, you HAVE to first start with knowing the corners colours. If we talk about the b1-h7 diagonal, we first learn that A1 is black so we derive that b1 is white... and so are all the squares on that diagonal. After time and practice, it becomes much quicker... and add more practice and it's "known".

Visualisation is not something that you just do. Like everything, you learn it ... slowly ... and then practice it repeatedly over time and it becomes easier and easier until it is known.

Oh yeah, I fully agree.
But do you agree with me that the curriculum not having included practicing colors is a slight oversight?

Perhaps!

It's been so long since I did the ICS training on visualisation, I truly don't know! Does it even get mentioned? I vaguely remember downloading some training tools in addition to their content, but I can't remember if it was their recommendation or if I just did it myself.

Chesseye is one of the tools... which I seem to have downloaded in 2011