How to describe colours

A common misconception is that image descriptions must not include colours. Allegedly, this information is useless after all because blind people cannot see colours anyway. Seriously, this is particularly hilarious when coming from people who absolutely insist in having line breaks, quotation marks or even emoji in alt-texts.

And this is nonsense.

Those who need image descriptions also need colours described

First of all, let's take a look at the primary target audience for image descriptions. We'll discover:

• Not everyone who is blind was born 100% blind. Some people lost their eyesight at some point in the past. They have seen colours in the past, and they still remember these colours.
• There is "absolutely blind", as in someone genuinely only "sees pitch black darkness", and there is "legally blind", as in someone's vision is too bad to be considered "visually impaired". But the latter can see colours.
• Visually-impaired people cannot see your images well enough either, so they require image descriptions. But they, too, can see colours.

If you don't describe colours, you throw all of them in front of the bus.

On the other hand, you do not throw those who have always been absolutely blind in front of the bus by describing colours. You do not hurt them. They've had so many images and things described to them that they associate the names of colours with something. They may not know what blue looks like. But they know what else is blue.

Also, let's take a look at the secondary target audience for image descriptions. This target audience is not necessarily visually impaired or even blind. They can't see your images due to technical limitations of sorts, even if these limitations are self-imposed. But at least most of them can see colours all right.

How to properly describe colours

However, none of the above means that those who need your image descriptions are familiar with that particular hue in that image of yours. So don't just name-drop "Burgundy red". Not everyone who cannot see your image knows what Burgundy red looks like. Those who don't know what Burgundy red looks like don't have any use for this information. At the same time, they don't know what the colour on whatever in your image is Burgundy red looks like.

The proper way of describing colours is by using one or two from a number of familiar basic colours as reference plus brightness plus saturation. These basic colours are:¹

• red
• blue
• yellow
• green
• orange
• purple
• violet (may actually be too much already)
• pink
• brown
• gold
• silver
• black
• grey (missing on the linked reference page)
• white

Only if the name of the colour itself matters within the context of the image and the post, it may be mentioned. However, it must still be described as explained above.

Examples

If the name of the colour does not matter, you describe it something like this:

A dark (brightness), slightly desaturated (saturation) red (primary basic colour) with a very slight hint of brown (secondary basic colour).

If the name of the colour does matter, you describe it something like this:

Burgundy red (name of the colour) which is a dark (brightness), slightly desaturated (saturation) red (primary basic colour) with a very slight hint of brown (secondary basic colour).