True colours: What colour signifiers mean when you can’t see them.
In ‘The Work of Representation’, cultural theorist Stuart Hall uses colour to offer a simple example of the expansive and complex nature of representation. In this example, colours demonstrate how signs are arbitrary.
“Red does not mean ‘Stop’ in nature, any more than Green means ‘Go’. In other settings, Red may stand for, symbolize or represent ‘Blood’ or ‘Danger’ or ‘Communism’; and Green may represent ‘Ireland’ or ‘The Countryside’ or ‘Environmentalism’ … Does it matter which colours we use? No, the constructionists argue. This is because what signifies is not the colours themselves but (a) the fact that they are different and can be distinguished from one another; and (b) the fact that they are organized into a particular sequence”
Stuart Hall, ‘The Work of Representation’ 2013
I wanted to expand on this point by highlighting vision impairment and variability. Worldwide, 440 million people are unable to distinguish differences between certain colours. Furthermore, all humans have some variation of colour visibility - gender, age and genetics can all play a part in how we can physically view the world. As such, when an audience decodes a particular set of colour signifiers - some audience members may physically experience the colours in very different ways. Even within a shared culture, the colour itself can be decoded very differently due to physical limitations.
8% of men and 0.5% of woman are colour blind. Given the variability of our physical access to colours, the ability to signify any meaning through colour is decreased. This supports the argument that language and signifiers are arbitrary.
For completely blind people, colour signifiers may be translated via a screen reader or braille so that they can be understood. An example of this might be an online form where an input field that is outlined in ‘red’ may need to be verbally translated ie ‘Error: This field is required’.
While the viewer may have a shared cultural language with the signified being represented, they may not have the physical means to interpret representations in a consistent way.
Instead of select hues, high contrast colour ratios, alternative text and braille can help ensure that content is accessible to vision impaired consumers of information. Even so, the representation is not consistently encoded and even more variability can occur in the audience's decoding of the representation. Colours, like all signifiers, are arbitrary - but are they meaningless?
This presents questions relating to access - Can we ever ensure that signifiers are accessible to all individuals? As globalisation and shared platforms develop further, how can accessible representation work across cultures in the digital space?
References
Hall, S. (2013). ‘The Work of Representation’. In Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, edited by Stuart Hall, 2nd ed., 1–47. Sage. ISBN: 9781849205634
Foreman, J. R. (2018). The prevalence and causes of vision impairment and blindness in Australia: The National Eye Health Survey (Doctoral dissertation, University of Melbourne)
Kovalev, V. A. (2004, August). Towards image retrieval for eight percent of color-blind men. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Pattern Recognition, 2004. ICPR 2004. (Vol. 2, pp. 943-946). IEEE.
