Being a Colourblind Designer  🔗 **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 Do not quote or attribute any other line to the named author.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/do (Announcer) Thank you to our sponsors. Platinum Sponsor: Gravity Forms. Build accessible, powerful WordPress forms with Gravity Forms, flexible tools for creators, developers, and teams of all sizes. Platinum Sponsor: WP Engine. WP Engine provides the most relied upon and trusted WordPress products for businesses, brands, and agencies of all sizes. Platinum Sponsor: Woo. WooCommerce is the open source e-commerce platform built on WordPress, helping merchants worldwide sell, manage, and grow their businesses. Gold Sponsors: Ally Web Accessibility, Equalize Digital – websites for everyone, GoDaddy, GreenGeeks Web Hosting, Yoast. Silver Sponsors: AAArdvark, CodeGeek – Your Vision, Our Talent, One Team. Kinetic Iris, Kinsta, Pressable, Second Melody. Bronze Sponsors: 9 Planets Hosting, Engage, Draw Attention, Multidots, NerdPress, Osom Studio, OZeWAI – Australian Web Accessibility Initiative, Progress Planner, Quality Logic, Sharp, Simply Schedule Appointments, SiteGround, StellarWP, Termageddon, WebYes. (Jessica Sams) Welcome to WordPress Accessibility Day 2025. My name is Jessica Sams, and I'm a Virtual Public Engagement Specialist with SWCA Environmental Consultants. Thank you for joining us for Being a Colourblind Designer with Matt Roberts. Matt is an award-winning senior UX designer, speaker, and writer advocating for accessibility and inclusive design. As a senior UX designer for Sightsavers and co-chair of BIMA's Inclusive Design Council, he shares insights at events and workshops, contributes to leading publications, and judges industry awards. His intention is as simple as helping people understand accessibility better. You may add your questions using Zoom's Q&A button anytime, and we'll answer them at the end of the presentation. Use the chat button to connect with other attendees. (Matt Roberts) Hello. Nice to meet you. My name is Matt Roberts, and today I'm going to be talking about being a colourblind designer. Comes in three parts. I'm going to start by really explaining what colour blindness is, then I'm going to talk about what it's like being colourblind, and then ultimately building that bigger picture about what it's like to be a colourblind designer. A quick intro to me first, putting job titles and everything aside, I care about making people feel included. I do that in a few ways. I'm an accessibility advocate, I'm a public speaker. I'm a writer. I co-chair a Inclusive Design Council here in the UK. I also do a lot of design judging, so ensuring that conversations on inclusion and accessibility are part of the judging criteria. And I'm also a senior user experience designer. Part one: Colour blindness. So, what is colour blindness, or colour vision deficiency? This is taken directly from a dictionary: colour blindness, a noun, is the inability to distinguish certain colours, or, rarely in humans, any colours at all. In terms of testing for colour blindness, it's often used is this test called the Ishihara test, and it's a collection of coloured dots. Within those dots is a number that, if you are colourblind, it's difficult to see, but if you're not colourblind, you can see those numbers straight away. This test was created in 1917 by a Japanese ophthalmologist, Dr. Shinobu Ishihara, to screen military recruits for colour blindness. Here's an example. I'll put it to you. What number is this? Is it A) 21, B) 74, or even, "There's a number, question mark"? What do we think? It's actually 74. Now, I say "actually", because I can't see that number. Now, I have absolutely double-checked, triple-checked that that definitely says 74. So, if it doesn't, please let me know, and I will let the person know that they've stitched me up. There are three types of colour blindness. There is protanopia, which is red blindness. Excuse my pronunciations. Deuteranopia, green blindness. And there's tritanopia, which is blue-yellow blindness. These are the three main types of colour blindness. There are a few more, but those are the three that are typically spoken about. For me, I am the first two, protanopia and deuteranopia, which is reds and greens. I find that incredibly difficult around Christmas time. Lots of things are red and green, a combination of things. Yes, for me, red and greens are the most difficult colours for me to see. I'll go on to explain a bit more about that as we go on. Is colour blindness hereditary? It is. This is something that I found out fairly recently after doing a bit more digging and a bit more research into this condition. It's actually one of the world's most common genetic inherited conditions, which means usually passed down from your parents. Can it be fixed? Always an interesting term, fixed. I don't typically like it in reference to conditions and personal circumstance. But in this case, can colour blindness be fixed? Sort of, I think is probably fair to say. There's manufacturers, similar to the example I've got on screen. This is from EnChroma. These are EnChroma glasses. They've got a tint on the lenses to essentially enhance the colours that you see. Imagine if you made everything glossy and laminated, the colours tend to be a little bit brighter, a little bit sharper. I've got a pair of these. They... I wouldn't say they work in terms of correcting colour blindness. So I couldn't say, for example, going back to that Ishihara test, I wouldn't say that if I put those on, I could then see the number 74. But what I could say is that they'd make those colours a little bit brighter. I'd be interested to know if you ever tried these and they work for you. But for me, they don't work. But it could be an option for you if you wanted to try and see colours a little bit more vibrantly. In terms of how many people, how common is it to be colourblind? A little question again to you. Do you think it's 1 in 12, 1 in 200 people, or 1 in 1,000? That's 1 in 12, 1 in 200, or 1 in 1,000. It's actually both A and B, A being 1 in 12, and that refers to the amount of men that are colourblind, and B, 1 in 200, that's 1 in 200 women are colourblind. So, a lot more common in men, but overall, perhaps more common than you thought. In terms of stats, talking today all about on WordPress Accessibility Day, so I found this stat about WordPress. Just to give these numbers a bit of context, so 409 million people view a WordPress every day. It's a statistic I found, which equates 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? In this part, I'd really prompt you, I've made myself a note there, is for you to ask questions, pop them in the chat, and I'll answer as many as possible. It's always quite interesting with sessions like this, where I'm trying to summarise as many lived experiences as possible to help you in whatever line of work you're involved in, personally or professionally. If there are any specific questions you've got for me, please ask. I'm going to go over the top four or five questions that I typically get asked, but if there's some extras, please do ask. There's a big word there, ask. Honestly, I will be more than happy to answer, like I say, as much as I can. The most common question I get asked is, what colour is grass? This is pretty much the first question, hence me putting that question one, that I get asked as soon as I say that I'm colourblind. For me, grass is green. It is my green. It may be slightly different to your green, but absolutely, it is green. The bit that I would struggle with in terms of grass being the context is, say, finding a cricket ball, so typically a red leather ball. I'd find that quite difficult to spot on a field. It is all about, again, using Ishihara test as a really good example. It's where colours are very close to each other, and it's very difficult for me to differentiate one colour from another, to pull out that thing. In terms of a cricket ball being red amongst a field of green, it would be quite difficult for me to find that red ball. Please, if you play cricket with me, be patient. I will find the ball eventually, but that is the scenario, for me at least. Question two that I get asked a lot is, what colour are traffic lights? I see, again, what most people see. This is, again, related to the overlapping or the separation of colours. The traffic lights are clearly separate, particularly here in the UK. The top one is red, and there's a middle one in a vertical line, a middle one that is amber or yellow, and the bottom one is green. I can see all those colours as much as anybody. I haven't got any points on my licence. We are all good, but yes, I see those, for me, in the correct way of red, amber, and green, even though I am red-green colourblind. Question three. What colour is this? Yes. This is very, very common. So when talking about colour blindness, I often then get-- Somebody will just point at something. It could be on screen, it could be wherever we are. And it's interesting, right? Like, somebody tells you they're seeing something slightly different, potentially from yourself, you're interested. Part three. We've learnt about colour blindness, how common it is, how it's tested, if it's hereditary. We've looked at some of the key questions that I get asked, and if I haven't covered those in your question, please do ask. It could be anything from what's it like playing snooker, and playing various sports, to shopping, to whatever it might be. Please do ask. Now I'm going to talk about what it's like not only being colourblind, but colourblind in a visual profession, so being a designer. It's a very obvious question, but most people will say, "How? How do you do that?" It's fairly easy, and I'll explain why. Imagine an older person designing a walking aid, or a one-handed person designing shoes, or a deaf person designing a music venue. There's a common theme. They are inherently designing with lived experience. Let me go back. Imagine, let's say, an older person designing a walking aid. They have a huge amount of experience of knowing what barriers and what frustrations they often have, as well as what actually works well. So, whether going to the local shops, getting on transport, whatever it might be, they know what works best for them, and they also know where the biggest frustrations are. It could be in the material, the weights, the ability to make it smaller and compact while they're on busier transport, whatever it might be. It's the same with the other examples there. A one-handed person designing shoes will consider it, consider the mechanisms, and things like that, in a more useful way. Same with a deaf person designing a music venue. All designing with years and years of experience. It's the same for me as a designer. So, the five benefits of being a colourblind designer is that I'm designing-- That sounded like I'm the next Marvel character. I design with a built-in filter, so I will never design anything that somebody who's colourblind cannot see, because I can't design what I can't see, if that makes sense. So that's a real huge, huge benefit that I do have. I'll cover an example in a second. Another of the benefits is that I'm a designer with empathy. I understand, to a certain extent, what it's like to feel excluded by the design, the presentation, the whatever it is might be in front of me. So when I am working on projects, I am that voice-- and touches on the third point, I am that voice about who this design might exclude in some way. Obviously, coming from colour blindness, I can talk about that. There's lots of other aspects that I can start to introduce to that conversation, to really make sure that that design, that presentation, whatever, will land and be representative of more people, and not make anybody feel excluded from that experience. Of course, I can answer colour-related questions. Design is typically quite a visual, and particularly graphic design and web design things. I answer very regularly what works and what doesn't work for colour-related scenarios. Finally, I can develop lots of teams' assumptions around what colour blindness is, and what it isn't. And that's a really healthy conversation to have. It doesn't mean that everything has to be very stripped back and plain. There's lots of things you can do with a real variety of bright, bold colours, and very pastel colours. It's just the combination that can make things a little bit more trickier for someone who's colourblind to engage with. Here's the example where I talk about designing with that kind of built-in feature, so to speak. This is a real example. This is something I came across a few months ago. This is a captcha form. Signing into a particular platform, you'll know that every now and again, you'll get this captcha form to make sure you're not a robot. And this one is incredibly complicated, beyond, if not impossible. This really was quite a moment to see whether, actually, is it that being colourblind is really impacting the way of trying to log into this platform, or is it generally possible? Looking at the right-hand side, there, at the example, there's so many colours that are interacting with each other. They're layered on each other. There's three examples across the top, and the first and the third are just full of these speckled dots. Now I'm thinking, as someone who's colourblind, who's quite aware of the Ishihara test, I'm thinking, is it one of those scenarios where I can't see the answer to progress through and log on to the platform? I had to reset it. I had to go through quite a few before getting to a scenario where I could actually log into this platform. It was quite a well-known platform. If I was then part of the design team at that particular company, I wouldn't be designing things like this. Maybe many of you wouldn't do something so complex. This was really an example where if there was somebody who was colourblind in the room of creating interactions like this, it would be a voice of saying, "If you cannot see the colour, can you still answer the question in order to log in to the platform?" Yes, captcha inputs obviously need to be complex, but for me, that was definitely an impossible task. So there's four common frustrations. There's a little bit of frustration there, as you can tell, on the captcha. But there are four common frustrations I get as a colourblind designer on a fairly regular basis, and the first one being, "See corrections in red". Red, obviously, synonymous with error or wrong. That is typically seen within documents and emails, and things like that. Well, if I can't see red, I'm going to struggle. People that are colourblind, going back to those numbers, 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women have a vision deficiency of some sort. That is a massive frustration. I'll talk about a solution to that in a moment, but that is absolutely one of the top frustrations that I do have. Another frustration is around comments like "it's not that serious, colour blindness". There's a huge spectrum of visual impairments, of course there is, but colour blindness is still fairly serious. We've already spoken about the seriousness of it from a medical perspective. It shouldn't be put to a not serious category, because absolutely it is. There's also these passive-aggressive comments, "Are you colourblind?" felt like in a, not passive-aggressive, but a derogatory manner. Yes, I am colourblind. Let's talk about it. Let's not put the emphasis on you can't do that, but let's have a conversation to really progress this conversation in a really positive way. And fourthly, "As you can see from this graph...", again I'll touch on a solution in a moment, but regardless of what profession you are in, you will see a profit and loss chart, you will see what's working well, you'll see it on product specifications type of pages, and things like what's good and bad, and where the distribution of your audience and things like that is. Often, there's a lot of colour, and they are in, again, very close proximity of each other. Again, with the green being positive and red being negative, if you can't see those differences, you don't know whether you're doing well or not so well. That is an absolute frustration. It's incredibly, incredibly common. So, what can you do with these, particularly these four frustrations? Firstly, with the "See corrections in red," please, please do annotate documents for corrections. Pretty much every tool that I've come across and I use now, there is a highlight and comment on it, and a feature then to highlight it and put the comment elsewhere. That's been an incredible game-changer in terms of being able to contribute to that, that business case, that document, that report, whatever it might be, because it's so much easier now to be able to spot those areas and corrections of what I've been tasked to do or to review. Secondly, the frustration with "It's not that serious" is around challenging your assumption, our assumptions of what different conditions are, so you're not put in that situation where you're incorrect, you're quite well educated, and you're interested in knowing what the different visual impairments in this case are like and how that can impact a particular experience that you're in. Thirdly, the frustrations around the derogatory, quite negative terms around "Are you colourblind?" Build an inclusive environment, build an environment within your workplace, personally or professionally, about open conversation and progressive conversation around just understanding it as having real interesting conversations where you can understand and know where the frustrations might be and where the solutions and innovation might come from as well. I haven't really spoken too much about innovation, but I think it's incredibly important when we're talking about accessibility is to really acknowledge, not things are a barrier and everything needs to be stripped back and simple and plain and boring and all that kind of stuff. See it as an opportunity to be innovative and provide a solution to make more and more people feel included, and colour blindness being absolutely part of that conversation, too. Then lastly, "As you can see from the graph...", there are quite a few solutions. I've put one on screen here. This is avoid relying on colour alone. As I mentioned, red is often seen as negative or no, 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. It's a useful thing to think about when you are designing something. Say, imagine that screen in greyscale. Take all the colour out of it. Can you see the difference in the graph of what it's trying to illustrate? The other ones, the other way we can do it is around better labelling, really be better with our legends and things like that, make them more visible, making the spaces, the bar graphs much bigger, so there's a bigger volume of colour on screen, but also simple labels, lines to what you're talking about, and being aware of it as a presenter, talking through what is presented on screen rather than relying on the ability of everybody's being able to differentiate those colours. Again, those numbers of 1 in 12 and 1 in 200. If you think about the size of your company and your customer base, that's a huge amount of audiences, a huge amount of people that are statistically colourblind. Before I go, a couple of little true or false facts about colour blindness. True or false, women can see more colours than men. What do you think to this? We talk about 1 in 12 men being colourblind, 1 in 200 women being colourblind, but can women see more colours than men? That is true. Some women can actually see more colours than men. It's about 12% of women carry a genetic variation that could allow them to be tetrachromats, meaning they may perceive millions more colours than average. Super, super interested. I'm not a scientist. Like I say, I'm not a doctor, but I would love to investigate that much further than I have already into understanding how, why women can see more colours, and what colours they might be. If anybody's got an answer, again, pop it in the chat. Really keen to understand more about this as well. True or false, monkeys have been cured of colour blindness. A weird thing. True or false? Have monkeys been cured of colour blindness? It is true. Hence, the shocked monkey face there on screen. In 2009, there was an experiment. Scientists successfully introduced a gene into squirrel monkeys that allowed them to see red and green for the first time, essentially curing their colour blindness. How? Why? I don't know. But that was a super interesting fact about colour blindness that I thought I'd share today. Finally, following on from that animal theme, true or false, horses have been "cured" of colour blindness. What do we think? Monkeys have. Have horses? Again, inverted commas on cured. That is false. Horses haven't been cured of colour blindness. Really, you thought it could be true. This is really all being part of this conversation today about challenging people's assumptions and seeing where we can improve our understanding of what colour blindness is, what we can do day to day, answer some of those key questions that you may have been having in the back of your mind. I'm incredibly, incredibly open about what colour blindness experience has been for myself. Again, if there's any questions, I will do my best to answer those in the chat. Lastly, a summary. Yes, colour blindness is much more common than you might think. Yes, it can be incredibly serious. And no, there's no cure for colourblind horses yet. Thank you so much for listening to me today, to investing in understanding more about colour blindness, being colourblind and being a colourblind designer as well. I hope it helps you, helps your team, and the customers that you work with. Like I say, a bit of a disclaimer. I'm not a medical professional. I am colourblind. I am simply colourblind. This is my personal perspective. There are so many others, and I really do encourage you to talk to as many people as possible. Have that open conversation. Create that open conversation where it's not that judgment, it's about interest and intrigue, and about innovation, and about really progressing the conversation. If you've got any questions after this session today, all my details are there. I'd love to talk more about it. On LinkedIn it's mattrobertsdesign, email [email protected], website mattroberts.me, Instagram, again forward slash, it's mattroberts.me. Thank you very much. (Jessica) Well, Matt, as your emcee, Jessica, I invite you to enable your camera and let's talk about the hop in chat and Q&A. It has been lively in there for sure. I wanted to thank you for that great presentation. We can go over some of the questions that we've already answered in writing. For instance, I captured from Colton, he asked, "What's it like interacting with Google Maps?" Maps can be difficult, you said. What helps is the flexibility of knowing how the map is presented, and zooming allows the maps to be more accessible for me. Do you have more to comment? (Matt) Yes, 100%. Yes, it's such a great question. Again, it's like an everyday interaction, isn't it? We're always trying to find somewhere we need to go. That flexibility with Google Maps and other maps out there, having that option to control the environment a little bit. The satellite view, and some of the other views, really can help just open up that availability and understanding things. Yes, once it's in a digital environment, by and large, that really does help. (Jessica) Let's move on. People are raring to know about tools and things. I'm going to go to the answered section. Jeff asks, "If you choose to use the colour red on your site, for example web links or buttons, and you provide enough contrast beyond four and a half to one, is it a concern for someone who is colourblind and has difficulty seeing red? What's the best colour?" (Matt) It's definitely unavoidable using red, particularly if that's your brand colour. You can't have that conversation with the brand ambassadors and the design team to say we need to change red because I saw a talk at WordPress Accessibility Day. What I would absolutely suggest, as I mentioned in the presentation, is just not relying on that colour alone. Error messages are really renowned for just highlighting the box that's been used incorrectly, just with a red outline. It's incredibly difficult to see. So, just adding some iconography to that button would be great. Also, when you're referring to something, say like the graphs and things like that, see colours in red where, if you can't see that red, then there needs to be other identifiers there to really help be as accessible and inclusive as possible. (Jessica) What about the brightness? I have another question that says, "Is identifying colours easier in brighter light situations?" (Matt) I haven't noticed. [laughs] Maybe that's a good thing. I haven't noticed whether it's a bright day or a gloomier day, or my phone screen is brighter or darker that if I can't see the colour, I generally can't see the colour. Yes, that's a great question, by the way. No better or worse for me. (Jessica) Then, our next question from Ellen, we will answer this live. What tools do you use as a workaround for sites that you can't tell the colours? She says, "Phones have a colourblind mode, and do you have that on a PC?" (Matt) I don't use any tools whatsoever. I experience the world as it is. Yes, I guess then as being a designer, I then ensure that what I'm designing, I can see, which means that hopefully allow more and more people to see. If a website has been badly designed and I can't see the colours or the error messages when I've been signing up for things, I certainly distance myself from that particular brand or maybe report it in a feedback thing. They might not be aware, and it's all about education and advocacy, isn't it? It's ensuring that there's a positive at the end of that minor frustration of not completing a registration form or something like that. (Jessica) So, really, you just turn away and-- Okay. [laughs] (Matt) Turn away. [laughs] Doesn't work for me. That's true of lots of experiences, right? If it doesn't work for you, then you have a certain threshold of patience. This isn't for me. I haven't been represented. I haven't been understood. There's a couple of ways of going about it. If you can contribute and have the energy to contact them and be part of their feedback system, maybe there's a insights community or something like user testing environment that you can contribute your perspective to hopefully educate and improve their services. (Jessica) Thank you. I'm going to combine two questions. It says, "Does the contrast versus the shade of the colours have an effect on the outcome of the colour for you? For example, dark green on light green." The next question, similar, that red and green, is it harder for you to differentiate? If they have red and green with higher contrast on the greyscale, do you have a better chance to distinguish them? (Matt) Yes, so there's definitely... So, if you have to use red and green, because Christmas is red and green, right? Then yes, absolutely, if the green is darker and the red is brighter, for me that definitely does help, because if you think about that scenario where if you were to view that in greyscale, which is available, you can see that there's a luminosity to the brighter colour compared to the darker colour. That's a fairly good indicator as to how accessible that is for someone who's colourblind. (Jessica) I want to segue over to tools. I remember reading in the chat while the simulive was playing, you had recommended Sim Daltonism, correct? (Matt) Yes. (Jessica) Can you go ahead and talk to us about that? It's not a WordPress tool per se. It's a standalone that is on your computer. I've used it. Love it. Go ahead. (Matt) Yes, it's a great tool. For those that don't know, it's a little overlay that you can put on your screen at any point, and just as you're working, you can just drag this window over and select the different types of colour blindness and experience in a certain way. It's really difficult to really simulate as accurately as possible all the colourblind variations, same with any visual impairments. They are simulations, they're pretty well educated, but they will give you enough of a steer to understand whether what you're producing might cause difficulty, really in understanding that document, that presentation, that packaging, whatever it may be. It's a really useful tool that anybody can get access to. (Jessica) Yes. Personally, I have installed Chrome toolbar tools, for like colour picker or colour simulators. That's like tied to your browser. Sim Daltonism is different because you can drag it over any application you're in. Like, say I'm in an Adobe product, and I'm designing in Adobe, I can, of course, always use their colour vision deficiency simulator. If I don't have that available to me, that built-in simulator, then that's where a third-party tool like that steps in, of course. (Matt) [crosstalk] Yes. It's really interesting for me because then somebody... we'd have conversations around tools like that and others, saying, then showing me, so like, How do you...? Does it work for you? Because I'm looking as a colourblind person through a colourblind thing, so I don't-- It's almost like double layer. It's really difficult, but having that conversation. If you start to see colours slightly differently, a little bit more set back or saturated, then that's a good thing because it's starting to educate you on different ways that somebody could be viewing your particular design. (Jessica) I'm spelling out the tool in the [chat]. (Matt) Perfect. Thank you. (Jessica) Let's go ahead to try to wrap up. I have about five more minutes of Q&A. I will tell you James's question. Is this partially why Europe uses neon signs instead of red for warning, et cetera? Do you have experience in Europe? (Matt) I'm definitely in Europe, but I don't know about this. I'm in the UK, so I don't know. I've never been asked that question, and I've never investigated. It'd be unfair for me to answer, but that is certainly a place that I can start having a look at going forward. That's really interesting. (Jessica) It might be talking about the-- On the chat, we had a dialogue about those traffic lights. In the US, we have a standard of either the red or the green is always in position. When I found out in the chat that there are some towns that flip their traffic lights horizontally and that causes stress, that was a new thing for me. Tell me about traffic lights. (Matt) Yes. I guess it's that familiarity with the system, isn't it? Just like you know that it's top, middle, and bottom. Whether you look at the colour or not, it's top, middle, and bottom. As soon as somebody starts to play with that system a little bit, you're then having to check it twice. Yes, certainly if you are colourblind in some sort of way, you are trying to learn it in a new way and see whether you should be stopping or carrying on driving. (Jessica) Riley had a question. It looks like it has been answered, but I'll give it a read. "I'm currently working on a project where we are designing line charts with up to 12 different values. I have noticed that the contrast between the lines is difficult to see. Most of them end up just being colour-coded, and line styles like the dash or the dotted quickly become confusing. Have you run into the challenge before, and what are your suggestions?" (Matt) Yes, I've run into it a lot. [laughs] Graphs, yes, particularly, like if there's one thing to take away from here, graphs and colour are a real pain point for people who are colourblind. The suggestion that I'll make is around the line graph specifically. If you are in a position to even make that line a little bit thicker, so there's a more visual space taking up that colour, as well as the dotted and dashes and all that, which is great to hear, if you can make those lines thicker or maybe split the graph up over two slides, if there's a way, or zooming in or something like that, which would really help more people, I think that would be a really strong starting point. (Jessica) I've seen those interactive graphs. Does that help you when you can hover over the legend, and then the part in the graph moves-- (Matt) Oh, yes, 100%. It's the same with, say, writing documents and editing them. You see corrections in red. You see it all the time, don't you? It's just inherently what's wrong, but where now a lot of the technologies are annotated comments. You don't necessarily have to see the red in the document, but you can see a highlighted comment section down the right-hand side panel. That's incredibly useful, and it's an absolute game-changer. (Jessica) Thank you. My next question from Dina, "I have a female college friend who was fully colourblind and has low vision, and she thought her sweater was entirely black until I was testing gel lights in a theatre lab, and a fully red light let her see the red patterns on her sweater for the first time, and I'm guessing pure light of particular colours might be helpful for pushing up the contrast." (Matt) That's incredible. [laughs] (Jessica) I don't have any comment on that one. (Matt) No, I've definitely been in those scenarios around fashion, though, thinking that I love this pair of brown trousers for years, and somebody's saying, "You realise those are green." "Well, then I've got a favourite pair of green trousers, not brown trousers." [laughs] It's sometimes as daft and light-hearted as that. (Jessica) I have another question. Do you want to give a shout-out to any kind of an accessibility plugin? Do you have a favourite? (Matt) Apart from Sim Daltonism, to be honest, I don't use them, so I wouldn't... [it would] be unfair of me to comment any more than that. Yes, I'd just encourage you to have a look in the design tools that you use, have a look at all the tools and plugins available for WordPress, and et cetera, et cetera. Just have a look. Also, as colour blindness is maybe more common than you think, you might actually know someone who's colourblind, so there's always that real human check as well on a particular document, and also to perhaps credit some of the tools that you are using, because they might be different to me, and they might use them and advocate for those as well. (Jessica) We started out with the title of this talk as Being a Colourblind Designer. As a designer, how do you begin the colour palette for an entire website or digital product? Do you do your colour contrast setup before you start? (Matt) 100%. You're looking at those palettes and having that conversation with your client, with your team as well, just starting at that point when you are in a position to tweak colours, and more often than not, maybe your client may not notice, but what you do do is 1) pass WCAG guidance more so, but also you certainly help more and more people who are colourblind, because you're doing those initial checks right from the off. We've all been there. It's so difficult to change it later on. [chuckles] (Jessica) It is. And we are at time. I want to thank you for your attention with these questions and answers. Audience, I thank you for attending the session with Matt Roberts. You can continue the conversation in the chat or on social media using #WPA11YDay and #WPAD2025. We also appreciate it if you go to 2025.accessibility.day/feedback to provide anonymous feedback for our speakers in their presentation. You can enter to win a t-shirt while you're there. Coming up next, stay tuned for typography, readability, and digital accessibility with Giulia Laco at 1700 UTC. While you're waiting, don't forget to visit our sponsors' pages to grab virtual swag and enter for a chance to win great prizes. See you right here after the break., Being a Colourblind Designer, Matt Roberts, 01m21cxv7q68c7ktr1d9wq5p3t.