Inclusion Over Exclusion: An Educators’ Guide to Creating Colourblind-Friendly Materials

As part of their daily work, educators have to make a range of materials for their classes, such as handouts, worksheets, and rubrics, for instance. Furthermore, if they are serious about their profession, they may also be running professional development sessions or presenting at academic or professional conferences. Therefore, they might also have to make flyers to advertise these events and infographics and slideshows to use during their sessions. However, there are a few areas many teachers seldom consider when making these digital artefacts—one of these being colour blindness, more accurately called colour vision deficiency (CVD). A study by Enchroma (n.d.-a), a company that makes glasses to help people with CVD, found that only 20% of teachers adapt their work to be CVD friendly. Even designers are not immune to ignoring CVD; “Out of the many vision-based disabilities out there, it is the most common behind nearsightedness and farsightedness, it is the most under-reported, and it’s among the least likely to be corrected” (Purcell, 2020, para. 4). With around 8% of men and 0.5% of women having some form of CVD (Berisso, 2018, p. 93) it is likely that some of an educator’s audience that receive their handouts and worksheets and/or look at their slideshows will have some degree of difficulty with the colours used on them if care is not taken with colour selection. Therefore, making these digital artefacts accessible to as many people in the audience as possible is something achievable and worthwhile for educators to aim for.