Colouring in: website design for the colour blind

Something your average travel company might not consider is that travellers with colour blindness may find their websites difficult to use. With this in mind, middle east based hotel group Rotana has launched a new corporate website, which they claim is colour blind friendly.

According to Rotana, more than 38% of guests book their stay online, and one in 12 of those is likely to be colour blind. This is higher than average. Around 12% of the world’s population have colour blindness, but almost 65% of those originate from Asia, the Middle East and Africa – Rotana’s core markets.

Rotana has invested £250,000 in its new site, ready for the brand’s significant expansion in 2011. Next year the hotel group is set to open 3,257 new rooms across seven hotels in the middle east and Africa. The creation of the new site marks the launch of Rotana’s own central reservations system (until recently, Rotana had been with Utell) and its own GDS code, RO.

Omer Kaddouri, Rotana’s chief operating officer, said that as a hospitality company, the new website needed to be accessible to everyone: “One of our primary goals was to ensure its simplicity of use and navigation, while remaining visually appealing.”

Graham Nonweiler, group managing director for Nonweiler Associates, who designed the website, explained why many sites are problematic for people with colour blindness: “Today, so many websites are crammed full of colour and imagery, in an attempt to create a visual experience, yet in so doing their design can make them inaccessible to many of their potential visitors.”

One of the main difficulties that people affected with colour sight impairment face, when browsing the web, is the excessive use of tonal colour variation for assisting navigation. “While these can add depth to an otherwise bland page for fully sighted visitors,” said Nonweiler, “they can represent a blurred single colour wash-out for those suffering from any of the three primary types of colour blindness.”

One example of how Rotana’s new website has attempted to combat this is the reservation box on the home page. It is a solid blue without any red elements, and is clearly separated from the images underneath by a solid shadow. Also, the text is in solid white lettering.

Fortunately, said Kaddouri, Rotana’s corporate colour is blue. “[This] causes the least problem for those suffering from colour blindness, but without careful consideration for the use of other colours beside it and uniform spacing between elements, our website could have easily become an unreadable mishmash of shapes.”

www.rotana.com