Being a Colourblind Designer - CourtneyR.dev's 2nd Brain

Being a Colourblind Designer ![rw-book-cover](https://img.youtube.com/vi/XK8_op7W0wo/maxresdefault.jpg) 🔗 **Source:** [Being a Colourblind Designer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK8_op7W0wo) > [!note]+ Document Notes > tags: [colour-blindness, accessibility, inclusive-design, ux-design, wordpress-accessibility-day] > author: Matt Roberts > source: WordPress Accessibility Day 2025 > reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK8_op7W0wo > date created: 2026-09-08 > > > [!info] Generated analysis — not the author's words. Sections below are machine-written > > from the captured source. Only text inside `> [!quote]` blocks is verbatim from the author. > > Do not quote or attribute any other line to the named author. > > # 🏷️ Title: Being a Colourblind Designer >  ## 🧭 Table of Contents - [📝 Summary](#-summary) - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#️-notes) - [📚 References](#-references) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#️-paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) - [❓ Questions](#-questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) - [💡 Implications](#-implications) - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#-deib-assessment) - [✅ Logical Validity](#-logical-validity) - [🛡️ DARVO Analysis](#-darvo-analysis) - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) - [🔄 Refactor Appendix](#-refactor-appendix--being-a-colourblind-designer) ### 🔗 References - Video: [Being a Colourblind Designer — WordPress Accessibility Day 2025](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK8_op7W0wo) - Matt Roberts, LinkedIn: mattrobertsdesign - Matt Roberts, website: mattroberts.me - Matt Roberts, email: [email protected] - Matt Roberts, Instagram: mattroberts.me - EnChroma (colour-enhancing glasses manufacturer, mentioned in talk) - Sim Daltonism (macOS colour-blindness simulation overlay, mentioned in talk) - Ishihara test — created 1917 by Dr. Shinobu Ishihara ## 📝 Summary - **What happened**: Matt Roberts, a senior UX designer at Sightsavers and co-chair of BIMA's Inclusive Design Council, spoke at WordPress Accessibility Day 2025 about living and designing with red-green colour blindness (protanopia and deuteranopia). Jessica Sams, a Virtual Public Engagement Specialist with SWCA Environmental Consultants, emceed the session, including a live Q&A. - **Why it matters**: Roberts cites a statistic that 409 million people view a WordPress site daily, which he translates to roughly 34 million colourblind male visitors and 2 million colourblind female visitors, based on population rates of 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women. That is a large, largely invisible audience segment for any WordPress-powered site that leans on colour alone (error states, charts, links, buttons). - **Key stakeholders**: WordPress theme and plugin designers, product and UX teams building error states and dashboards, the WordPress Accessibility Day organizing team and its sponsors (Gravity Forms, WP Engine, Woo, Equalize Digital, Yoast, and others named in the intro), and colourblind end users of any WordPress site. - **Risks and tradeoffs**: Designs that encode meaning purely through colour (red = error, green = pass, red vs. green line charts) exclude a measurable share of any audience. Roberts frames the fix as additive (icons, patterns, labels, thicker lines) rather than a full redesign, so the tradeoff is modest extra design time, not colour removal. - **Bottom line**: Roberts argues colour blindness is common (not rare), serious (not trivial), and — because he designs only what he himself can see — a genuine asset on a design team, not just a constraint to accommodate. ## 📖 Main Content Roberts structures the talk in three parts: what colour blindness is, what it is like to live with it day to day, and what it means to design while colourblind. **Part one — defining colour blindness.** He opens with a dictionary definition (inability to distinguish certain colours) and the Ishihara test, a set of dot-pattern plates created in 1917 by Japanese ophthalmologist Dr. Shinobu Ishihara to screen military recruits. He shows a plate most sighted viewers read as 74; he cannot see the number himself. He names three types — protanopia (red blindness), deuteranopia (green blindness), and tritanopia (blue-yellow blindness) — and identifies as having the first two, which combine into red-green colour blindness. He calls out Christmas decor (red and green together) as a recurring hard case. He states the condition is hereditary, one of the most common inherited genetic conditions, and describes EnChroma glasses as a partial workaround: tinted lenses that brighten and sharpen colour without correcting the underlying deficiency. He has tried a pair and says they do not let him pass the Ishihara test, though they may help others see more vibrantly. On prevalence, he gives 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women, then applies that to a WordPress usage stat (409 million daily viewers) to estimate roughly 34 million colourblind male visitors and 2 million colourblind female visitors across the platform. **Part two — lived experience.** He works through the questions he is asked most: grass is green to him, but a red cricket ball is hard to pick out against a green field because the colours sit close in his perceptible range; traffic lights read correctly for him in the UK's fixed vertical order (red top, amber middle, green bottom) because position, not just hue, carries the signal — a point echoed in the Q&A when an audience member raises US towns that flip signals horizontally, which removes that positional cue and adds stress for colourblind drivers. **Part three — designing while colourblind.** Roberts lists five benefits: he designs with a built-in filter (he cannot ship a design he cannot himself perceive), he designs with empathy for exclusion, he is a built-in advocate voice in the room, he can answer colour questions directly, and he can correct teammates' assumptions about what colour blindness is and is not. He illustrates the cost of ignoring this with a real CAPTCHA he encountered on a well-known platform — dense, layered, speckled colour patterns he had to reset multiple times to get past. He names four recurring frustrations: red-only correction marks in documents, being told colour blindness "isn't serious," being asked "are you colourblind?" in a dismissive tone, and colour-only charts ("as you can see from this graph..."). For each, he proposes a fix: use highlight-and-comment tools instead of red markup, challenge assumptions rather than repeat them, build open conversation instead of judgment, and for charts, avoid relying on colour alone — pattern a red segment against a solid green one, check the design in greyscale, use bigger legends and labels, and narrate charts aloud when presenting. He closes with three true/false facts: women can see more colours than men is **true** (he cites that around 12% of women carry a genetic variation that may make them tetrachromats, perceiving millions more colours than average); monkeys have been cured of colour blindness is **true** (a 2009 experiment introduced a gene into squirrel monkeys that let them see red and green for the first time); horses have been "cured" of colour blindness is **false**. The Q&A adds practical detail: Google Maps' zoom and satellite views help him navigate; he tells teams not to abandon a red brand colour but to pair it with iconography and not rely on contrast ratio alone; brightness of the room or screen makes no difference to what he can see; he uses no assistive colour tools himself and instead builds accessibility into what he designs, disengaging from badly designed products rather than fighting through them; darker green against brighter red (a luminosity/greyscale difference) is easier for him to read than two saturated colours of similar brightness; he recommends Sim Daltonism, a free macOS overlay that simulates colour-blindness types over any application, as distinct from browser-only tools like Chrome colour-picker extensions or Adobe's built-in colour-vision-deficiency simulator; for line charts with many series (a question from an attendee named Riley about 12-value charts), he suggests thicker lines and splitting or zooming a chart rather than depending on dash/dot styles alone; interactive graphs with hover-to-highlight legends help him the same way redline-to-comment tools do in documents; and he starts every project's colour palette with contrast checks from day one, which both meets WCAG guidance and serves colourblind users before a late-stage colour fix becomes painful to make. ### 🗒️ Notes #### ⏱️ [00:01:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK8_op7W0wo&t=97s) Welcome and speaker introduction - Jessica Sams (Virtual Public Engagement Specialist, SWCA Environmental Consultants) introduces Matt Roberts as a senior UX designer at Sightsavers and co-chair of BIMA's Inclusive Design Council. - Sponsors named: Gravity Forms and WP Engine and Woo (Platinum); Ally Web Accessibility, Equalize Digital, GoDaddy, GreenGeeks, Yoast (Gold), among others. #### ⏱️ [00:02:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK8_op7W0wo&t=159s) Talk structure and Matt's intro - Roberts previews the three-part structure: what colour blindness is, what it's like to live with it, what it's like to design with it. - Describes himself as accessibility advocate, public speaker, writer, Inclusive Design Council co-chair, design judge, and senior UX designer. #### ⏱️ [00:03:48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK8_op7W0wo&t=228s) Defining colour blindness and the Ishihara test - Dictionary definition: inability to distinguish certain colours. - Ishihara test, created 1917 by Dr. Shinobu Ishihara to screen military recruits; demo plate most viewers read as 74, which Roberts cannot see. #### ⏱️ [00:05:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK8_op7W0wo&t=332s) Three types of colour blindness - Protanopia (red blindness), deuteranopia (green blindness), tritanopia (blue-yellow blindness). - Roberts has protanopia and deuteranopia — red-green colour blindness — and names Christmas red/green combinations as a persistent hard case. #### ⏱️ [00:06:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK8_op7W0wo&t=388s) Hereditary and "fixable" - States colour blindness is hereditary and one of the world's most common inherited genetic conditions. #### ⏱️ [00:07:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK8_op7W0wo&t=438s) EnChroma glasses - Tinted lenses brighten/sharpen colour but do not correct the deficiency; Roberts owns a pair and still cannot read the Ishihara plate through them. #### ⏱️ [00:08:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK8_op7W0wo&t=501s) Prevalence and WordPress-scale stats - 1 in 12 men, 1 in 200 women are colourblind. - Applied to "409 million people view a WordPress every day": roughly 34 million colourblind male visitors, 2 million colourblind female visitors. #### ⏱️ [00:10:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK8_op7W0wo&t=649s) Grass and the cricket ball - Grass reads as green to Roberts; a red cricket ball on a green field is hard to spot because the colours sit close together perceptually. #### ⏱️ [00:12:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK8_op7W0wo&t=728s) Traffic lights - Roberts reads UK traffic lights correctly because position (top/middle/bottom) reinforces colour; no points on his driving licence. #### ⏱️ [00:16:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK8_op7W0wo&t=973s) Five benefits of being a colourblind designer - Built-in filter, designs with empathy, is a voice for who gets excluded, answers colour questions directly, corrects team assumptions. #### ⏱️ [00:18:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK8_op7W0wo&t=1136s) The CAPTCHA example - A dense, layered, speckled CAPTCHA on a well-known platform forced multiple resets before Roberts could log in. #### ⏱️ [00:21:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK8_op7W0wo&t=1275s) Four common frustrations - Red-only corrections; "it's not that serious"; passive-aggressive "are you colourblind?"; colour-only charts. #### ⏱️ [00:24:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK8_op7W0wo&t=1447s) Solutions to the four frustrations - Highlight-and-comment tools instead of red markup; challenge assumptions; build open conversation; pattern vs. solid fills, greyscale checks, bigger labels, verbal narration for charts. #### ⏱️ [00:28:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK8_op7W0wo&t=1729s) True/false facts and close - Women can see more colours than men (true — ~12% carry a tetrachromacy-linked gene variant); monkeys cured of colour blindness (true — 2009 squirrel-monkey gene experiment); horses cured (false). Roberts gives contact details: LinkedIn mattrobertsdesign, [email protected], mattroberts.me, Instagram mattroberts.me. #### ⏱️ [00:34:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK8_op7W0wo&t=2040s) Q&A: Google Maps - Zoom and satellite view give Roberts flexibility that helps him navigate. #### ⏱️ [00:35:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK8_op7W0wo&t=2104s) Q&A: red brand colour and contrast - Don't drop a red brand colour; add iconography and don't rely on contrast ratio alone to solve it. #### ⏱️ [00:37:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK8_op7W0wo&t=2221s) Q&A: no personal assistive tools - Roberts uses no colourblind-mode tools himself; he builds accessibility into what he designs and disengages from products that fail him. #### ⏱️ [00:38:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK8_op7W0wo&t=2331s) Q&A: contrast and shade - Darker green against brighter red (a luminosity difference visible in greyscale) is easier for Roberts to distinguish than two similarly saturated colours. #### ⏱️ [00:39:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK8_op7W0wo&t=2398s) Q&A: Sim Daltonism - Free overlay tool that drags over any application to simulate colour-blindness types; distinct from browser-only extensions or Adobe's built-in simulator. #### ⏱️ [00:43:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK8_op7W0wo&t=2638s) Q&A: 12-value line charts (Riley's question) - Suggests thicker lines and splitting/zooming charts, since dash/dot line styles alone still confuse at high series counts. #### ⏱️ [00:47:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK8_op7W0wo&t=2871s) Q&A: colour palette process and wrap-up - Roberts runs contrast checks from the start of a project — meets WCAG guidance and serves colourblind users before a late fix becomes painful. ## 📚 References - [WordPress Accessibility Day 2025 — Being a Colourblind Designer (video)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK8_op7W0wo) - [Matt Roberts — website](https://mattroberts.me) - [Matt Roberts — LinkedIn (mattrobertsdesign)](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattrobertsdesign) - Ishihara test — Dr. Shinobu Ishihara, 1917 (referenced in talk; no URL given) - EnChroma glasses (referenced in talk; manufacturer name only, no URL given) - Sim Daltonism (referenced in talk; macOS overlay tool, no URL given) ## 🗣️ Paraphrase Roberts opens by walking through the mechanics of colour blindness itself: the Ishihara dot test a Japanese ophthalmologist built in 1917 for military screening, the three named types, and the fact that his own is the red-green combination that makes Christmas decorations and cricket balls on grass genuinely hard to parse. He is candid that gadgets like EnChroma glasses brighten colour without curing anything, and he grounds the scale of the issue in a WordPress-specific number: with 409 million daily viewers of WordPress sites, a colourblind-rate of 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women works out to tens of millions of visitors who cannot rely on colour alone to use those sites. The back half of the talk turns personal experience into a design practice. Roberts frames being colourblind as a design asset, not just a limitation to route around: he cannot ship an interface he cannot himself read, which forces every design he touches to work without colour as the sole signal. He backs that with a live failure case — a CAPTCHA so colour-dense he had to reset it repeatedly — and four frustrations he hears constantly, from red-only markup in documents to colour-only charts, each paired with a concrete fix (comment tools instead of red ink, pattern-plus-colour instead of colour-alone, greyscale checks, thicker chart lines, narrated visuals). The Q&A reinforces that his fixes are additive, not subtractive: keep the brand's red, keep the chart, just stop making colour the only carrier of meaning. ## 📰 Newsletter Ever design an error state that's just a red outline? Matt Roberts — senior UX designer at Sightsavers and co-chair of BIMA's Inclusive Design Council — spent WordPress Accessibility Day 2025 explaining why that quietly locks out a real chunk of your audience. He's red-green colourblind (protanopia + deuteranopia) and walked through the numbers: 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women are colourblind, which on a platform serving 409 million daily WordPress viewers works out to roughly 34 million colourblind men and 2 million colourblind women. His fixes don't require stripping colour from your site — pair red with an icon, check your charts in greyscale, thicken your chart lines, and use comment-and-highlight tools instead of red-only markup in docs. He also flagged a free macOS tool worth trying: Sim Daltonism, an overlay that simulates colour-blindness types over any app on your screen. Full talk (with a lively Q&A on CAPTCHAs, traffic lights, and 12-line charts) is on the WordPress Accessibility Day 2025 archive. ## ✅ Action Items #### DevRel - Developer advocacy: build a short talk or workshop from Roberts' "don't rely on colour alone" fixes (pattern-plus-colour, greyscale checks) for WordPress theme and plugin developers. - Education: point developers building admin-facing dashboards or WooCommerce reporting UI at Sim Daltonism as a free, low-friction QA step. - Developer experience: not directly addressed — talk covers design practice, not SDKs or docs tooling. - Developer marketing: not addressed in this source. - Community management: not addressed in this source. - Internal/external/cross-project: share the WordPress-scale colourblind-visitor estimate (34M men, 2M women) with theme review and Twenty* default-theme teams as a concrete audience-size argument for colour-independent error states. #### OSPO - Policy & Governance: not applicable to this source — talk is about UX practice, not open-source contribution policy. - License Compliance: not applicable to this source. - Security Management: not applicable to this source. - Software Inventory: not applicable to this source. - Developer Support: not applicable to this source. - Community Engagement: not applicable to this source. - Strategic Alignment: not applicable to this source. #### Community - Maintainers: plugin and theme maintainers should audit error-state and admin-notice colour usage (red-only borders/text) against Roberts' "annotate, don't rely on red alone" guidance. - Contributors: a good "first issue" candidate is auditing default WooCommerce and Core admin charts for colour-only encoding. - Sponsors: not directly addressed in this source. - Ecosystem: WordPress Accessibility Day itself is the cross-project venue this talk came from; worth cross-posting the recap to Make WordPress Accessibility. #### WordPress - Core: audit Core admin notices, form validation, and Site Health results for colour-only pass/fail signaling; add iconography per Roberts' recommendation. - Core Performance: not applicable to this source. - Core AI: not applicable to this source. - Core Program Team: not applicable to this source. - Mobile: audit the WordPress mobile app's stats charts (colour-coded views/likes/comments) against the "thicker lines, pattern-plus-colour" guidance for line and bar charts. - Playground: not applicable to this source. - Community: WordPress Accessibility Day organizers should keep sessions like this one in the annual lineup; it drew active live Q&A (11+ audience questions answered on air). - Training: build a Learn WordPress module on designing colour-independent error and status states, using Roberts' four frustrations as the outline. - Marketing: not applicable to this source. - Support: forum/support-team responders should know that "it's red so it's an error" instructions in canned replies may not work for colourblind users — pair with element names or icons. - Design: the WordPress design team should test default theme.json colour palettes and Core UI charts in Sim Daltonism as part of design QA. - Documentation: add a colour-independent-signaling guideline to Core's Design Handbook or the accessibility handbook, citing WCAG 1.4.1 (use of color). - Photos: not applicable to this source. - TV: WordPress.tv should confirm this session has accurate captions given it is itself an accessibility-day talk. - Polyglots: not applicable to this source. - Accessibility: the Accessibility team should track this talk's four-frustrations framework (red corrections, "not serious" dismissal, colour-only charts, derogatory questioning) as a recurring audit checklist item. - Meta: not applicable to this source. - CLI: not applicable to this source. - Hosting: hosting dashboards (usage graphs, uptime charts) should apply the same colour-independent-chart guidance Roberts gives for line graphs. - Tide: not applicable to this source. - Openverse: not applicable to this source. - Themes: theme reviewers should flag themes whose only "sale/error/success" signal is a colour swatch with no icon or pattern. - Plugins: plugin reviewers (especially form and e-commerce plugins) should check validation-error UI against the "annotate, don't rely on red alone" guidance; Gravity Forms and Equalize Digital, both sponsors of this event, are natural early adopters. #### The WPOCC - Programs: not applicable to this source — talk doesn't address fellowship, funding, or governance programs. - Projects: not applicable to this source. - Funding experiments: not applicable to this source. ### FAIR - Technical independence: not applicable to this source. - Policies and covenants: not applicable to this source. - Productized governance artifacts: not applicable to this source. ## 🧪 Hypotheses - H1: WordPress admin screens that use colour-only pass/fail signaling (e.g., Site Health green/red dots) cause measurably higher task-abandonment among colourblind users than screens using icon-plus-colour signaling. - H2: Replacing red-only form-validation borders with icon-plus-text error messaging reduces failed WooCommerce checkout attempts among colourblind shoppers. - H3: Chart line-thickness and pattern differentiation (vs. colour-and-dash-style alone) improves comprehension speed for colourblind viewers on charts with 8+ data series, as Roberts' 12-value line-chart answer implies. - H4: A CAPTCHA relying on colour-differentiated dot patterns (as in Roberts' example) produces a higher failure/reset rate for colourblind users than for the general population, independent of general CAPTCHA difficulty. - H5: Teams that run contrast/colour-independence checks at the start of a design project (Roberts' stated practice) ship fewer post-launch colour-accessibility fixes than teams that check late. ## 📊 Methodology - For H1/H2: A/B test two versions of the same admin or checkout screen (colour-only vs. colour+icon) with a screened panel of colourblind and non-colourblind participants; measure task completion time and error rate. Recruit via a colour-vision self-report plus an Ishihara-style screening step. - For H3: Present colourblind and non-colourblind participants with the same 12-series line chart in a thin-line/dash-only version and a thick-line/pattern version; measure time-to-correct-answer on "which series is highest at X" tasks. - For H4: Run the same CAPTCHA design through automated colour-contrast analysis (e.g., check dot-cluster hue separation against a colour-blindness simulator like Sim Daltonism) and compare simulated pass rates against reported real-world reset rates. - For H5: Survey a sample of WordPress product teams on when in their process they run colour-accessibility checks (start vs. end) and correlate against post-launch accessibility bug counts logged in their issue trackers. ## ❓ Questions - What specific CAPTCHA vendor/platform did Roberts encounter — is it still in production, and has it been reported to the vendor's accessibility team? - Does the "1 in 12 men, 1 in 200 women" prevalence figure Roberts cites hold consistently across the demographic mix of typical WordPress site visitors, or does it vary meaningfully by region? - Beyond Sim Daltonism, what tools do WordPress-specific teams (theme authors, Twenty* default themes, WooCommerce) currently use to test colour-only signaling before shipping? - Roberts says he "doesn't use any tools whatsoever" to compensate for his own colour blindness — how common is that non-use of assistive colourblind-mode tooling among colourblind professionals generally, versus reliance on OS-level or browser colour filters? - What does the tetrachromacy research Roberts references (12% of women carrying the gene variant) say about practical design implications — should any design guidance change based on it, or is it purely a curiosity? ## 🔮 Future Research - A structured audit of WordPress Core, the default Twenty* themes, and top WooCommerce/Gravity Forms admin screens for colour-only signaling, benchmarked against Roberts' four-frustrations framework. - Usability research specifically on CAPTCHA colour-density failure rates among colourblind users, given Roberts' anecdote of a "well-known platform" requiring multiple resets. - A follow-up study on whether icon-plus-colour error messaging (Roberts' recommended fix) measurably improves completion rates in real WordPress form plugins, not just in lab conditions. - Investigation into whether the EnChroma-style colour-enhancing-glasses category has improved since Roberts' hands-on test, since he reports they don't help him pass the Ishihara test. ## 💡 Implications - **Practice**: Design teams should treat "no colour-only signaling" as a baseline requirement (comparable to alt text), not a nice-to-have, given Roberts' population math for a WordPress-scale audience. - **Policy**: WCAG 1.4.1 (Use of Color) is already a Level A success criterion; this talk is a concrete argument for WordPress accessibility guidelines to cite it explicitly in admin-UI and theme-review checklists. - **Security**: CAPTCHA and other verification flows that lean on colour-dense patterns risk failing legitimate colourblind users, which is a usability-security tradeoff worth flagging to any plugin implementing bot-verification. - **Education**: Learn WordPress and onboarding materials for new theme/plugin authors could fold in Roberts' "annotate, don't rely on red alone" and "check in greyscale" heuristics as quick, testable design rules. - **Funding models**: Not directly addressed by this source — talk is a practice-level accessibility session, not a funding or sustainability discussion. ## 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment - Reading level estimate: Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level approximately 7-8 for the spoken transcript (short, conversational sentences, minimal jargon beyond named colour-blindness terms, which Roberts defines on first use). #### 👀 Visual learners - Present: Roberts references on-screen slides (the Ishihara plate, the EnChroma glasses photo, the CAPTCHA screenshot, a bar-graph example) throughout, though the transcript alone doesn't carry the visuals. - Improve: publish the slide deck or screenshots (CAPTCHA example, greyscale chart comparison) alongside the video so visual learners aren't dependent on the speaker's narration alone. #### 🔊 Aural learners - Present: the talk is inherently spoken-format with a live, unscripted Q&A — strong for aural learners already. - Improve: a standalone 2-3 minute audio recap of the "five benefits" and "four frustrations" lists would help aural learners retrieve the core framework without replaying the full 48 minutes. #### 🗣️ Verbal learners - Present: Roberts defines every technical term on first use (protanopia, deuteranopia, tritanopia, Ishihara test) and uses concrete analogies (Christmas red/green, brown-vs-green trousers). - Improve: a short glossary card (term + one-line definition) would let verbal learners cross-reference the three colour-blindness types quickly. #### 🧩 Kinesthetic learners - Present: Roberts recommends a hands-on tool (Sim Daltonism) that lets viewers simulate colour blindness live on their own screen. - Improve: a follow-along exercise — "open Sim Daltonism, load your own site, and try to complete your own checkout flow" — would convert the talk into an actionable lab. #### 🧠 Logical learners - Present: the four-frustrations-to-four-fixes structure and the five-benefits list are already clean, numbered frameworks. - Improve: a simple before/after decision table (signal type → colour-only risk → fix) would make the logic reusable as a design-review checklist. #### 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Social learners - Present: the live Q&A itself is a strong social-learning artifact — 11+ distinct audience questions answered in real time. - Improve: a moderated follow-up discussion thread (e.g., in the WordPress Accessibility community Slack) keyed to specific Q&A moments would extend the conversation. #### 🧘‍♀️ Solitary learners - Present: Roberts' closing true/false quiz format (women's colour vision, monkeys, horses) works as a self-check. - Improve: a short self-paced worksheet — "review your last three shipped charts in greyscale; note what you can no longer distinguish" — would give solitary learners a concrete task. #### 🌿 Naturalistic learners - Present: the grass/cricket-ball and traffic-light examples are drawn from everyday, real-world environments rather than abstract design theory. - Improve: tie the "check in greyscale" heuristic to an explicit sustainability angle (e.g., lower-saturation, higher-contrast UI often also reduces render cost on e-ink or low-power displays) if a naturalistic framing is wanted. ## 📊 Accessibility Assessment #### Screen reader semantics - Present: not directly assessable from the transcript alone; the session was live-captioned via Zoom Q&A per the emcee's instructions. - Improve: publish a proper heading structure and alt text for any shared slide deck; map bar/line chart data to a text-equivalent table for screen reader users. Maps to WCAG 1.1.1 (Non-text Content) and 1.3.1 (Info and Relationships). #### Keyboard navigation - Not applicable to this source — the talk is a spoken video/Q&A session, not an interactive interface, so keyboard-navigation behavior isn't observable here. #### Contrast and readability - Present: Roberts explicitly recommends checking designs in greyscale and pairing darker/brighter colour pairs to preserve a luminosity difference — a practical proxy for WCAG 1.4.3/1.4.11 contrast minimums. - Improve: any published slides or recap graphics from this talk should be run through an actual contrast checker (4.5:1 text, 3:1 for graphical objects) rather than relying on the greyscale heuristic alone. Maps to WCAG 1.4.3 (Contrast Minimum) and 1.4.11 (Non-text Contrast). #### Text resizing and reflow - Not applicable to this source — no on-screen text-reflow behavior is discussed or observable in a spoken-talk transcript. #### Media and captions - Present: WordPress Accessibility Day sessions are typically captioned; the emcee references live Zoom Q&A and a feedback link for the session. - Improve: confirm the published WordPress.tv/YouTube version carries accurate, human-reviewed captions and a downloadable transcript (this analysis was built from exactly that transcript). Maps to WCAG 1.2.2 (Captions, Prerecorded) and 1.2.4/1.2.5 where applicable. #### Forms and interactions - Present: Roberts' CAPTCHA anecdote is itself a first-hand accessibility-failure report — a colour-dense CAPTCHA with no accessible fallback path. - Improve: any CAPTCHA implementation should provide a non-colour-dependent alternative (audio challenge, logic puzzle, or accessible checkbox-style verification). Maps to WCAG 1.4.1 (Use of Color) and 3.3.1/3.3.3 (Error Identification/Suggestion). #### Standards reference - Core gaps identified in this talk map most directly to WCAG 2.2 AA 1.4.1 (Use of Color), 1.4.3 (Contrast Minimum), 1.4.11 (Non-text Contrast), and 3.3.1 (Error Identification). ## 🌍 DEIB Assessment #### Cultural breadth - Present: Roberts is UK-based and speaks from that context (UK traffic-light order, UK driving licence reference); the Q&A surfaces a US audience member's example of horizontally flipped traffic lights, briefly widening the geographic frame. - Improve: the talk could explicitly compare colour-blindness accommodation norms (e.g., traffic signal design, warning-sign colour standards) across more regions, since Roberts admits he doesn't know the answer to the audience's Europe/neon-sign question. #### Inclusive language - Present: Roberts is careful and precise with terminology, defines every clinical term on first use, and explicitly rejects the framing of colour blindness as something to "fix," calling that word choice "an interesting term." - Improve: none identified — this is a strength of the talk as delivered. #### Neurodiversity support - Present: the talk is chunked into a clear three-part structure with recurring signposting ("part one," "part two," "part three") that aids predictability. - Improve: a written outline or timestamped chapter list (as provided in this note's Notes section) would help viewers who benefit from a fixed structure to navigate rather than relying on the spoken signposting alone. #### Representation - Present: Roberts speaks from direct lived experience as a colourblind person and designer, which is the core credibility of the talk; the Q&A surfaces a second-hand account (Dina's friend, who is colourblind with low vision) adding another perspective. - Improve: the talk centers one person's experience of red-green colour blindness; it doesn't cover tritanopia (blue-yellow) or total colour blindness firsthand, which it flags itself ("there's a huge spectrum... I really do encourage you to talk to as many people as possible"). #### Psychological safety - Present: Roberts explicitly reframes the "are you colourblind?" question from a derogatory register into an invitation for open conversation, modeling a non-defensive response to a common microaggression. - Improve: none identified — the talk's own content is the improvement here, directly coaching audiences toward safer conversational framing. ## ✅ Logical Validity #### Strong reasoning - Roberts uses inductive reasoning built on direct lived experience (his own colour blindness) generalized into design principles — for example, moving from "I couldn't see the CAPTCHA" to "colour-dense verification flows exclude colourblind users broadly." This is strong because the underlying claim (some users can't distinguish certain hues) is medically well-established and the generalization is modest and testable. - He uses a proportional/statistical argument to establish scale: population rate (1 in 12 men, 1 in 200 women) applied to a stated WordPress usage figure (409 million daily viewers) to produce an estimate (34 million/2 million colourblind visitors). This is a valid application of a rate to a population, and he is transparent that it's a statistical estimate rather than a measured count. - To clarify further: the note would be stronger if he cited the source of the "409 million daily WordPress viewers" figure and the colourblind-prevalence rate, since both numbers currently rest on his stated authority alone. #### Fallacies - No clear formal or informal fallacy is present in the main talk. Roberts is careful to qualify uncertain claims ("I'm not a scientist," "I don't know," "it'd be unfair for me to answer") rather than overreach — for example, he explicitly declines to speculate on the Europe/neon-signs question rather than guessing. - One soft overgeneralization risk: Roberts frames his personal experience of red-green colour blindness as broadly representative of "being a colourblind designer," while the condition covers a spectrum including tritanopia and total colour blindness that he does not have. He flags this himself late in the talk ("this is my personal perspective... I really do encourage you to talk to as many people as possible"), which is the correct fix and largely defuses the risk — but a listener who only catches the earlier framing could still walk away over-generalizing from his single case. #### Tone of voice - Conversational, self-deprecating, and consistently invitational — Roberts repeatedly asks the audience to interrupt with questions, jokes about his own captcha frustration, and reframes potentially loaded questions ("are you colourblind?") into constructive ones. The tone stays practical and solution-oriented rather than grievance-focused, even when describing genuine frustrations. ## 🛡️ DARVO Analysis - **Deny**: Not applicable to this source — the talk describes Roberts' own lived experience and design recommendations; there is no accusation being denied. - **Attack**: Not applicable to this source — Roberts does not attack any accuser's credibility; the closest analog is naming frustrating behaviors (derogatory "are you colourblind?" comments) as a pattern to fix, not a personal attack on anyone. - **Reverse victim/offender**: Not applicable to this source — no attempt to recast an accused party as the victim occurs; the talk is educational, not a response to a specific conflict or complaint. ## 🎯 Conclusion Roberts' bottom line is that colour blindness affects roughly 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women — which, applied to WordPress' own stated 409 million daily viewers, works out to millions of visitors who cannot rely on colour alone — and that fixing for it is additive (icons, patterns, greyscale checks, thicker chart lines) rather than a wholesale redesign. Practical next steps for readers: audit any red-only error states, colour-only chart legends, and CAPTCHA or verification flows in WordPress themes and plugins you maintain; add Sim Daltonism to your design QA toolkit; and run contrast/colour-independence checks at project start rather than as a late-stage fix, per Roberts' own stated practice. ## 🔄 Refactor Appendix — Being a Colourblind Designer > Density: 2–5 Literature atoms (H3), 0–3 Permanent candidates (H4). > Defaults: 3 Literature, 1 Permanent. Resonance filter: if you can't > articulate in one line why a claim matters, drop it. > > Konik claim-header rules: present tense, declarative, ≤10 words when > possible, searchable, unique, mirrors annotation focus if present. > > Atomicity: one declarative sentence per atom. "and"/"also" → split. > > Tag pool: #bmf · #addendum · #xref · #articleseed · #storystem · #share · #aphorisms ### 📚 Literature Atoms (H3) #### [H1] Colourblind designers design with a built-in filter > [!quote] ID:rw_XK8_op7W0wo_h1 > "I will never design anything that somebody who's colourblind cannot see, because I can't design what I can't see" **Context & use**: - From the "five benefits of being a colourblind designer" section, 00:16:13 into the talk (t=973s). - Reframes a lived constraint as a built-in QA mechanism — worth citing whenever inclusive-hiring or lived-experience-design arguments come up. **Tags**: #xref #aphorisms **Highlight**: [view highlight](readwise://01m21cxv7q68c7ktr1d9wq5p3t)  #### [H2] WordPress-scale colourblind audience runs into the millions > [!quote] ID:rw_XK8_op7W0wo_h2 > "34 million male visitors are colourblind, and 2 million female visitors are colourblind" **Context & use**: - Roberts' own extrapolation from population colour-blindness rates applied to a stated 409-million-daily-viewer WordPress figure, 00:09:32 into the talk (t=572s). - Useful as a concrete scale argument for prioritizing colour-independent signaling in Core/theme design reviews. **Tags**: #xref #addendum **Highlight**: [view highlight](readwise://01m21cxv7q68c7ktr1d9wq5p3t)  #### [H3] Avoid relying on colour alone in charts and error states > [!quote] ID:rw_XK8_op7W0wo_h3 > "use a patterned red against a solid green" **Context & use**: - Roberts' core fix for the "as you can see from this graph" frustration, 00:27:15 into the talk (t=1635s). - Directly actionable design rule — pairs with a greyscale-check habit for any chart or status indicator. **Tags**: #xref #articleseed **Highlight**: [view highlight](readwise://01m21cxv7q68c7ktr1d9wq5p3t)  ### 🧠 Permanent Candidates (H4) #### [P1] Colour-only signaling is a scale problem, not an edge case **Claim** (one sentence, Courtney's voice): Any UI decision that encodes meaning through colour alone should be treated as a measurable-scale accessibility gap, not a rare edge case, because population-level colourblindness rates (1 in 12 men, 1 in 200 women) translate into millions of affected users on any platform with WordPress-scale traffic. **Evidence pointer**: [[#H2]] **Scope & conditions**: Holds for any visual UI serving a general audience; the specific 1-in-12/1-in-200 rates are population averages and may shift for narrower demographic segments. **Links** (≥1 with annotation): - [[WCAG 1.4.1 Use of Color]] — because applies-in accessibility-review checklists - [[Design QA checklist]] — because extends existing contrast-check practice with a colour-independence check  ### ✏️ Fleeting Queue - [F1] Look into Sim Daltonism as a standing addition to design-review tooling for WordPress theme/plugin QA — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK8_op7W0wo #xref - [F2] Check whether the "409 million daily WordPress viewers" figure Roberts cites has a traceable primary source, for use in future accessibility-scale arguments — #xref ### → Things 3 (max 2 actions) - [ ] Audit courtneyr.dev and current plugin admin-notice/error UI for colour-only signaling — accessibility follow-up #things  📄 **Full text:** [[Full Document Contents/Articles/Being a Colourblind Designer.md|Being a Colourblind Designer by Matt Roberts]] ## Highlights - to statistically 34 million male visitors are colourblind, and 2 million female visitors are colourblind. Statistically speaking, that is quite a few. Taking those numbers, particularly in terms of WordPress as well. What's it like being colourblind? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m21e7kffkjffe1qmkftvcc5d)) - Note: Roberts converts prevalence (1 in 12 men, 1 in 200 women) into WordPress-scale numbers. This is the move that turns "colour blindness is common" into a design-priority argument a stakeholder can act on. - Tags: colour-blindness, inclusive-design, atom/literature/h2 - and green is yes, pass, whatever. A good way to solve this, can't really, in some instances, get away from those colours, is perhaps use a patterned red against a solid green. That way, regardless of what colours people can and cannot see, you are noticing the difference between a pattern and a solid colour. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m21e7ra72ybcrwr69k59erv9)) - Note: The concrete fix for red/green status indicators when you can't drop the colours: pattern versus solid carries the distinction independent of hue. Directly applicable to WCAG 1.4.1 Use of Color. - Tags: colour-blindness, atom/literature/h3, ux-design