Colorblindness may not be a common occurrence you see every day. About 300 million people are colorblind across the world. While that is a small percentage of our overall population, that doesn’t mean that your library can’t be prepared to serve patrons who are colorblind.

According to the National Institute of Health, colorblindness “means a person see colors differently than most people. Most of the time, color vision deficiency makes it hard to tell the difference between certain colors. Usually, color vision deficiency runs in families. Most people who have color vision deficiency don’t have problems with everyday activities.”  Most of the issues for colorblind people come from red-and-green combinations as a pair of opposites in design in posters, presentations, etc. The first rule of making a palette for colorblind – avoid combining red and green.

If you want to continue supporting colorblind patrons, purchasing a pair of color correcting glasses, like the kind made by EnChroma could help enhance their use of the library. Or the glasses could be put into circulation through a “library of things” so a colorblind patron could test them out before deciding to buy a pair for themselves.

Below is a list of resources and articles about supporting those who are colorblind:

“Libraries offer corrective glasses to color-blind patrons”
“Improve Accessibility for Users Who are Visually Impaired with These 9 Tips”
“The best charts for color blind viewers”
“Designing For (and With) Color Blindness”

This post was written by Abby Chumin, librarian in the Indiana Talking Book and Braille Library, and previously appeared in the April 2025 Collaborative Summer Library Program newsletter.