Watchdog sees red as BBC ‘fails colour blindness test in election’
THE BBC failed to consider the needs of colour blind viewers during general election coverage, the broadcaster’s watchdog has found.
The BBC Trust upheld a series of complaints about confusing graphics and asked the broadcaster to review its guidance for people who struggle to see colour.
It concluded the corporation “failed to meet best-practice standards and in so doing it had not considered the needs of a significant minority of its audience at an important time”.
Community interest group Colour Blind Awareness complained some of the broadcasts around the 2015 UK general election were a “joke” for two million colour blind voters, who could not read graphics and website information depicted in different colours.
The complaint said it was difficult to distinguish between the blue and purple for Conservative and Ukip respectively, the red and orange for Labour and Liberal Democrats respectively, the orange and yellow for Lib Dem and SNP and the maroon and dark green of the Northern Ireland parties.
Other viewers also struggled with differentiating between the red and green of Labour and Plaid Cymru and orange and green for Lib Dem and Plaid Cymru. The group also noted that the BBC had used at least nine different shades of orange.
Kathryn Albany-Ward, founder of the group, who raised a number of concerns about the BBC’s use of graphics, said: “We have been making the BBC aware for some time that a lot of their broadcast and online information is difficult for colour blind people to understand – with virtually no success. When the impending 2015 election graphics fiasco came to our attention and we were being given the brush-off, we decided enough was enough.
“The BBC can’t stand by and knowingly discriminate against nearly five per cent of the population at any time, but in the runup to a general election we found their attitude to be totally unacceptable.”