On considering the color blindness of potential clients

As someone who designs layouts, I don’t think nearly often enough about color blindness.

What’s worse is that I have a color blind colleague who regularly reviews my work!

But I should worry about more than colleague: I should worry about potential clients.

According to the National Eye Institute, one in 12 men has some form of color blindness. (Women are less likely to have common genetic types of color blindness because these types are recessive traits passed on the X chromosome. With two X chromosomes, a woman must inherit X-linked traits from both parents to be color blind.)

That means that around 4% of the population has some type of color blindness.

My team sends out over 50 proposals and qualifications every year—if five people on average review each submission, that amounts to 250 total reviewers a year. With one out of every 24 people affected by some type of color blindness, that’s a whopping 10 color blind people reviewing my work.

I put more effort into a proposal with the assumption that the reviewer is a nitpicky grammar nerd like me! But grammar nerds are a rare breed; the odds are much, much greater that the reviewer is color blind.

After doing this job (or its equivalent) for the better part of seven years, I have not considered color blindness once as it affects my work, save for when our website developer brought up color blind accessibility and I affirmed its importance.

My weak defense—overlooking the obvious absence of universal design thinking—is that there is no convenient way to review documents for color blindness.

But that’s not true.

It may have been true a few years ago—but it’s not anymore.

An article on CreativePro explains how you can open a PDF in Illustrator and pretty easily review the document as it would be seen by people affected by two common types of color blindness.

Having considered the potential downside of not considering color blindness, it seems like an obvious way to start my next proposal effort: let’s check out what the final submission would look like through the eyes of a likely reviewer.