Colour Blindness Awareness Day

Colour Blindness Awareness Day raises awareness about colour vision deficiency and its impact on daily life, including digital accessibility. Around 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women have some form of colour vision deficiency, most commonly difficulty distinguishing between reds, greens, oranges, and browns.

The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative’s user story for Lexie, an online shopper with deuteranopia and protanopia, describes the everyday barriers caused by interfaces that rely on colour alone. Required form fields outlined in red can be invisible to her at checkout, fantasy football apps that distinguish teams only by jersey colour are unusable, and pie charts without labels or patterns can’t be read. The fix is rarely difficult: a secondary cue alongside colour — an asterisk, an icon, a label, a texture, the word “required” — makes the same information accessible.

Websites that work well for people with similar access needs never use colour as the only way to convey meaning. They pair colour with text labels, icons, patterns, or shapes; mark required form fields with both a colour and a symbol or word; describe data series in charts using labels or textures as well as colour; and provide enough contrast between text and background so the information remains legible regardless of colour perception.