When we look at digital or printed material, our brains tend to remember color first.

Color encourages better attention and memory performance. Warm types of colors such as yellow, red and orange have a greater effect on attention, compared to the cool type of colors like brown and gray. The right combination of colors is also important because it can produce different levels of contrast; we'll see an example of this later in the module.

example of a color wheel

The most common form of color deficiency, red-green color deficiency, affects approximately 8% of the population. Meaning that the average classroom has 2-4 students that experience some form of "color blindness". There is also a blue-yellow deficiency that is not as common.

The Challenges of Using ONLY Color

Using ONLY colors such as red and green to indicate important content or to highlight specific area or content (especially to indicate required fields in a form) can be a barrier to users in being able to accurately perceive and understand your text or other visual content.

On the other hand, some groups of people with disabilities, particularly users with learning disabilities, can benefit greatly from color "coding" when used to distinguish and organize your content. And example of this is use of different colors for common handouts - pale blue for a syllabus or weekly schedules, yellow for assignments, pink for homework...etc. Another example would be to use purple bold text to always indicate some kind of alert or important information that you want students to pay particular attention to.

To satisfy both groups, you should think intentionally when using color coding for your written content. Adding other visual indicators or icons in text heavy documents- things such as asterisks, exclamation points or question marks, or an "information" icon image- to indicate specific types of important information or sections can help users understand and navigate your documents in a structured and organized way. Color need nott be the only visual means of conveying information, indicating an action, prompting a response, or distinguishing a visual element.

Resources

The Colorblind Web Page Filter is a useful tool that lets you look at web content through a colorblindness filter.