Are colours killing your great ideas?

When you step in front of an audience to deliver your presentation, you can never really tell how many audience members will be running into issues with what you’re presenting and how you’re presenting it.

One thing we must keep in mind as inclusive communicators is that it’s always 100% our responsibility to speak, teach and show up in the most accessible way possible. We may not have any control over the challenges that our audience members face, but we have absolute control over how we choose to share our messages with them.

The question you must always keep at the forefront is: “what can I do to make sure I truly connect with everyone in my audience, regardless of what disability they may have?”

You know your content inside and out. You’ve worked hard for years to craft your message into a finely honed object of beauty and clarity. You’re confident that your content is clear and unambiguous. It’s laser-focused. Self-explanatory. You’ve developed mind-blowing strategies to drive your ideas home in a cohesive and innovative way. Your ideas all logically fall into place and build into a powerful conclusion for your presentation. You’ve built a masterpiece that everyone can understand. Plus, it flows so well!

Or so you think.

Now you find yourself on stage, showing these elegantly designed slides, sharing stories about clients whom you’ve helped reach a new level of success thanks to your brilliant ideas. Your talk culminates into one juicy pie chart that gives away your secret sauce, complete with stunning colours that even align with your brand. Beside that graph is a legend, showing what each piece of the pie represents and how the whole strategy comes together. Revolutionary.

You might be absolutely convinced that it will clearly translate for everyone in the audience, but honestly, how can you be so sure? Your experience doesn’t not necessarily equate to others. The worst thing you can do is make assumptions about your audience and let your own unconscious biases cloud your judgment.

As an example, let’s get a feel for one potential disability that your audience may be dealing with. We’ll dive deeper into other such examples in the future, but for now, we’ll start out with one of the more obvious issues that you didn’t take into account when creating your “perfect” slide. Use of colours to convey information.

How to deal with the use of colours

Do you know anyone close to you who is colourblind? You probably do, given how prevalent this condition is in society. According to the Colorblind Awareness Association (https://www.colourblindawareness.org/colour-blindness/), colour blindness affects approximately 1 in 12 men (8%) and 1 in 200 women in the world, which translates to approximately 300 million people worldwide. These are people who experience varying degrees of colour vision deficiency. It’s almost the same number of people as the entire population of the United States!

So, what do you think are the odds that someone in your audience might struggle with perceiving and differentiating colours? Pretty darn good I’d say…

Colourblindness doesn’t mean that people can’t perceive colours at all, but audience members affected by this deficiency will perceive them in a very different way than the rest of us. One of the most common issues faced wil be the inability to distinguish between colours used in graphs and the legends right next to it. If these people are unable to associate the data with the colours, they probably won’t get the gist at all.

If you’re banking on that great slide to wrap your presentation up with fireworks, chances are, what you’ll be delivering to those who can’t properly perceive colours are rather wet firecrackers: you’ll fail at your goal, but you’ll also fail them in the process.

You know what they say… pie charts, stacked bars, and other graphs are like jokes. If you find yourself having to explain them to your audience, they’re probably not that great.

The general rule of thumb is that you should never rely on colour alone to differentiate objects that are in close proximity in your graphics. If you must, at least be sure to consider colours that people who are colourblind can more easily perceive, by choosing one that are very strongly contrasted, so that people are able to tell them apart somewhat.

Also consider adding background patterns to the different parts of the graphs. That can make all the difference in the world for those who struggle with colour perception, but guess what, these best practices will also help everybody else when the lighting conditions in which your content is consumed are less than ideal.

Another trick worth mentioning is to test the visibility of your graphics by turning them into grayscale. Different tools, including Microsoft PowerPoint on Windows, allow you to this with the click of a button. If your graphs translate well and the information remains very clear, then you can feel more confident that a larger portion of your audience will be able to fully understand them. It’ll be that many more audience members who will appreciate you taking their needs and expectations into consideration.

Working inclusively with colours is just one of the ways in which you can start changing how you approach building your digital content and training materials. In the future, we’ll look at many more tips and tricks, but this is a great first step to bridging the gap for inclusion.

I can promise you that your audience will notice the difference.

You won’t even need to take my word for it.

Their own feedback will be all the proof you’ll ever need.