Brand Color and Accessibility: What Every Designer Should Know

The Invisible Audience

Roughly 8% of men and 0.5% of women have some form of color vision deficiency. That's a significant portion of any brand's audience. Designing brand color systems without considering this is designing for a subset of your audience and presenting differently — sometimes confusingly — to everyone else.

This isn't a legal compliance issue in most cases. It's a quality issue. A brand that relies on color distinctions that aren't universally perceptible is leaving communication on the table.

What Color Vision Deficiency Actually Means

The most common form is red-green deficiency, which affects the perception of the red-green axis. Blues and yellows are typically unaffected. Deuteranopia and protanopia are the most common variants; total color blindness (achromatopsia) is rare.

What this means practically: a brand palette built on red and green distinctions — without sufficient luminance contrast — will look like two identical values to a significant portion of viewers. A chart that distinguishes "positive" from "negative" in red and green communicates nothing in these cases.

Designing for Robust Color Communication

The solution is not to avoid red and green — it's to never rely on hue alone to carry information. When color distinctions matter, support them with at least one of:

• Value (lightness/darkness) contrast — light versus dark, not just red versus green
• Pattern or texture — different fills, not just different colors
• Label or icon — text or symbolic reinforcement alongside color coding
• Shape or position — structural distinction that works without color perception

For brand color systems specifically, I ensure the primary color palette has distinguishable values as well as distinguishable hues. If I'm designing a system with multiple accent colors that need to be differentiated, I check them under simulated color vision conditions.

Tools for Checking

I use a few free tools for this:

Coblis (online): upload any image and see it simulated under multiple types of color vision deficiency. Takes 30 seconds and reveals most problems immediately.

Figma accessibility plugins: several plugins can simulate color deficiency directly in the design tool.

WCAG contrast checker: for text on color backgrounds, the minimum contrast ratio is 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text. This applies to brand materials as well as digital interfaces.

The Brand Color Audit

When I'm developing or auditing a brand palette, I run every meaningful color pairing through a color vision simulation. Brand primary on white background. Brand secondary on primary. Any color combinations used to distinguish information.

Most brand palettes pass this check without modification. The ones that don't usually have a simple fix — adjusting the value of one color slightly to increase luminance contrast while keeping the hue.

Accessibility in color isn't a constraint. It's evidence that the system was designed completely.