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Meet Coen, who has colour vision deficiency. Learn about Coen’s accessibility requirements to better understand how to support students who have similar conditions.
Bio
Coen is a 30-year-old student and uses he/him pronouns. His life motto is “Community care is paramount”.
Coen has colour vision deficiency. His goals are to work and conduct research.
Access requirements and impacts
Coen has colour vision deficiency (also known as colour blindness), which means he requires text and patterns to be used in addition to colour to determine meaning, and also needs strong colour contrast to be able to distinguish between different colours.
Coen is not registered with accessibility and chooses to not disclose colour vision deficiency to tutors or peers.
There are multiple conditions that can cause people to experience issues with colour perception, including Deuteranopia (red-green), Protanopia (red-green), and Trianopia (blue-yellow).
Here are some of the things that Coen needs in order to be able to participate in class:
- Adequate colour contrast: if two similar colours are used (for example, yellow on white background), Coen will have trouble distinguishing between them and will not be able to use the content. Refer to the resources at the bottom of this page to learn more about colour contrast. As a general rule, aim for high contrast, such as black text on a white background.
- Use patterns and symbols alongside colour to convey meaning: a common example of colour used for meaning is green for correct/good, and red for incorrect/bad. In this example, an easy way to include a symbol would be to use a tick or cross alongside any coloured text.
- Awareness of potential misunderstanding?
Frustrations
Here are some of the barriers that Coen deals with in daily life.
- Not being able to keep up or feeling lost in class.
- Not knowing if he’s missing something when looking at an image.
- Fears unfair assessment marking regarding exams or assignments with diagram analysis.
- Suffers in silence.
- Can’t access supports without acknowledging and communicating his access needs to someone.
Online
- Incompatible colour contrast on diagrams and slides.
- Insufficient image description in lectures and tutorials.
- Insufficient contrast on captions burned into a video.
- When there is no colour contrast he cannot distinguish graphs and tables, takes longer to complete tasks.
- Charts/graphs need to be converted into accessible tables.
- Needs graphs and tables to have patterns to distinguish content.
- Needs text descriptions for complex images (e.g. diagrams, graphs).
- Assessments are not formatted correctly to excel in the task.
On campus
- If tutor is using whiteboards, the colours of markers may affect his ability to read and understand what’s going on.
- Printed copies of in class documents may use inaccessible colour palettes.
- Campus signage may be hard to read.
Find out more
The following resources provide information on how to use colour in an accessible way.
- Education Express: Colour – accessible practice
- Vision Australia: Colour contrast checkers, simulators, palettes
These resources provide further information on accessible practices for vision-related disabilities.
- ADCET: Supporting blind and vision impaired students online
- ADCET: Reasonable adjustments – Blind and vision impaired
- Education Express: Alternative text – accessible practice
- Education Express: Captions and transcripts – accessible practice
Please note
- Everyone’s access needs are different, and what works for one person may not work for another.
- Other health conditions can make access needs more complex or change how they show up day to day.
- Some people may have other disabilities they don’t mention if they aren’t relevant, but these may still affect them at times.