How colour perception affects the experience

In a previous post, we introduced the idea of communication breakdowns when it comes to the way we share ideas from the platform, and how these same ideas can be received by audience members who have disabilities. What that post revealed was that oftentimes, communication is not a two-way street.

Today, let’s take a closer look at how and why communication breakdowns occur when the use of colours comes into play. With colours, unsuspected challenges often creep in right out of the gate, due to the assumptions we make about our audience and what they can perceive. By questioning what we take for granted, we soon realize the changes that must be made to improve the experience.

As an example, let’s consider the use of colours as a strategy to convey information. In another post titled “Are colours killing your great ideas?”, we talked about how colours can look the same, or show very little differences to those who are colourblind. But there’s more to colour perception than colourblindness. Here are a few examples.

Keeping clients away from Fadeout Town

Use of highly contrasted colours, supported by additional visual cues such as distinctive patterns or text is necessary to help audience members with colour perception deficiencies feel cared for. That’s a definitive benefit, especially when we consider the prevalence of the condition.

With around 8 to 10% of men, and 1 woman out of every 200 on average, dealing with color perception deficiency issues, it’s a significant amount of people in any given audience who could miss out on important cues if we’re careless about the way colours are leveraged in our presentations or materials.

But did you ever give any thought to the collateral benefits of colour mindfulness for the rest of your audience who doesn’t have such issues? Truth is, paying attention to how we leverage colours in our materials will also make perceiving the information shared that much easier for everyone else to appreciate as well! This is far from negligible, as I’ve yet to hear about anyone complaining that colours used in this material were to easy to distinguish, or perceive.

Just think about audience members who are ageing, and whose perception of colours starts to falter? Those whose sight is failing, and simply can no longer make out contrasts the way they used to, or perceive fonts that are not sufficiently contrasted against their background?
What about those who would normally be able to perceive that information, but due to poor lighting conditions, or because of where they’re sitting in the audience, find themselves unable to do so that day? Again, communication is not always a two-way street.

And then, what about those audience members who can’t perceive visual information at all when it’s based solely on colour or visuals? What happens with them? Are you starting to get the picture about how this can potentially affect the ability of your material to be taken in by some of your audience?

For audience members unable to efficiently perceive information based on colour, a careless use of colours will result in no successful ways for them to take in your content. Assuming that everyone will be able to see your content properly is going to be your biggest downfall and their easy escape to Fadeout Town.

When you’re not clearly presenting materials in ways that are easy to see, perceive and follow, you’re inviting your audience to disengage. Which, in turn, prevents them from ever becoming a client. And who knows… maybe you then miss out on what could have been your greatest client ever!

Getting clarity on colours and contrasts

So, what can you do to get clarity on your use of colours? Glad you asked.

A great way for you to tell if you’ve done enough to keep colours distinguishable is simply to turn your content into grayscale. Most presentation tools, such as PowerPoint, Keynote, and Google Slides will allow you to easily do this. Worse case scenario, screen capture tools such as SnagIt and various browser add-ons will also allow you to do the same.

Once colours have been taken out, and all that’s left are shades of gray, you will instantly start noticing if anything is amiss. Would-be gaps in colours will reveal themselves clearly, as you’re no longer be able to distinguish easily between different elements. Noticing that your message feels weaker without colours will be your biggest reveal that information might be harder to perceive than you realize for others.

On the contrary, once you turn your content into grayscale and everything remains perfectly perceivable and distinguishable, once you can confirm that you’re not missing out on key information, chances are, you’re probably good to go. It’s a simple test, and it goes a long way in making many of your audience members feel like they matter.

As you can imagine, colour perception is just one of the many aspects you should keep top of mind as a speaker, if you strive to create more inclusive experiences. What about those who can’t see well or at all, those who can’t hear or have other types of disabilities? We’ll touch more on those considerations next time.