Colour Blind Awareness Day is a fantastic opportunity to celebrate and raise awareness of people with colour blindness. The date for Colour Blind Awareness Day was chosen because it’s the birthday of John Dalton.
John Dalton was a scientist who was born on 6th September 1766. He was the first person known to realise colour blindness exists. As a scientist he became aware that neither he nor his brother saw colours the same way as everyone else. He thought this was because they had blue liquid in their eyes and Dalton left his eyes to science so that people could find out when he died. They didn’t! However, Dalton did understand that because both he and his brother were affected that their condition must be hereditary. Over 150 years later DNA proved he had inherited colour blindness. Colour blindness is also known as Daltonism in his memory.
From a standing start when we conceived the idea of the first Colour Blind Awareness Day in 2015, we’re amazed to have achieved 37 million social media impressions in 2021! We couldn’t have done this without the help and support of thousands of individuals and some amazing ambassadors and corporate supporters.
We’d love to keep the momentum growing with your help. Find out below how we’ve been celebrating Colour Blind Awareness Day over the years and read on to find out how you can join in this year.
In addition to our usual Colour blind Awareness Day activities promoting awareness with our partners in education and sport, Colour Blind Awareness Day 2024 sees a big shift in focus for us as we launch our new website dedicated to providing business consultancy services – Colour Blind Awareness Consulting. We’ll be promoting our new website via social media using #LetsWorkTogether.
If you represent a business keen to be inclusive please get in touch via the new website.
We think that having spent the last 15 years raising awareness of colour blindness across society the next step in bringing about actual changes to the everyday lives of colour blind people is for us to work more closely with businesses by helping them to embed real change across their organisations, products and services.
Please help by sharing our posts on 6th September.
As usual we’re working with many high profile partners to raise awareness of colour blindness on the big day. In recent years we’re concentrated upon the challenges for colour blind people in sport but this year we’re planning a wider message which we hope everyone will want to share.
You can find our main Twitter/X post here
It's #ColourBlindAwarenessDay 2023!
We’re highlighting #the300million people🌍who need recognition & support. You'll find them amongst your
Friends & Family 👨👩👧👦
Students 🧑🎓🧮
Clients and Customers 🛒💻
Employees 🧑💼🧑⚕️
Teammates ⚽️🏉🏑#1in12men #1in200women #1in12boys #1in200girls pic.twitter.com/RamQ9dmb6R— ColourBlindAwareness 🇺🇦 🌻 (@colourblindorg) September 6, 2023
Don’t forget to check back here our social media accounts (below) on the day to share our video and message.
Please let us know what you will be doing via our social media accounts as we’d love to share your posts too. Please use the hashtags from 2022 which you relate to the most. Thank you!
We’re also now on Threads (@colourblindorg).
As usual we’ll be working with our lovely ambassadors and partners to raise awareness on 6th September, but how can you join in?
Any way you want!
Please share any information/your thoughts and/or other social media content far and wide. Remember to copy us in @colourblindorg on Twitter and Instagram and to use our hashtags, especially #ColourBlindAwarenessDay or #ColorBlindAwarenessDay so we can keep track on the day.
Don’t forget to share other hashtags too.
#Iam1in12 #Iam1in200 (if you are colour blind and you want to let people know)
#1in12boys #1in12men #1in200girls #1in200women
…. and if you’re interested in sport
More information to follow shortly!
WOW – 37 million social media impressions achieved! Thank you everyone!
For the second year running we were supported by our TACBIS project partners and ambassadors as well as UEFA, The FA, FA Wales and numerous other football clubs and leagues.
World Rugby also decided to launch their guidance on colour blindness for rugby on Colour Blind Awareness Day which helped us to spread the word to a new sport worldwide.
We can’t possibly thank everyone who helped us individually but if you joined in on the day, thank you!
Through TACBIS we also launched a drawing competition – The Tyrone Mings gif is of the winning entry from Aston Villa Foundation.
Thanks to incredible support, especially from our friends in football, Colour Blind Awareness Day 2020 had over 12.5 million social media impressions!
With funding from the EU’s Erasmus+ Sport fund we teamed up with our fantastic TACBIS partners to launch an animated video to raise awareness of colour blindness in football and we were supported on the day by some big names from the world of football including Bruno Fernandes, Jessica Silva, Matt Holland, Gaizka Mendieta and Gary Lineker. Articles were also published by BBC Sport, UEFA, The FA and others on their websites and social media pages.
In 2019 our focus was on education with the publication of our latest #1inEveryClassroom video which was funded from an award from our UEFA Foundation For Children.
The #1inEveryClassroom video was shared across social media shows some common challenges in school for colour blind children of all ages.
For Colour Blind Awareness Day 2018, following on from the success of the 2017 campaign in sport (see below), we built upon the continued support of our friends at UEFA and the FA and our supporters around the world and were especially keen for 2018 to turn the focus back towards education by highlighting issues in the classroom.
We asked colour blind people everywhere to share their experiences at school using #Iwishmyteacherknew on our social media accounts.
Colour Blind Awareness Day 2017 was a huge year for us as it marked the launch of the first ever guidance document on colour blindness in sport. UEFA and the English Football Association shared their work with us on Colour Blind Awareness Day and this was the start of huge changes in sport.
Of course, we made a big fuss of John Dalton’s 250th birthday promoting #Iam1in12 and #Iam1in200 and we were delighted to see awareness of Colour Blind Awareness Day beginning to spread around the world. In 2016 we were still getting to grips with social media and we could already see that the idea of a day to celebrate colour blind people was definitely going to catch on!
The start of it all, the very beginning of Colour Blind Awareness Day! How could we have known it would grow so quickly in the first 5 years!
We launched our hashtags #Iam1in12 #Iam1in200 to allow colour blind people to speak up and share their experiences.
Please join in and copy us in to your social media posts so we can keep the momentum growing!
ColourBlindAwareness
@colourblindorg
@colourblindorg