Annual business charity donations to Colour Blind Awareness

When Simon and Scot decided to combine their decades of experience and start to Cox & Flight, one of the first things they committed to was to put aside a percentage of their annual profits towards business charity donations.

Cox & Flight’s chosen charity this year is one very close to Scot’s heart: Colour Blind Awareness. Here, in his own words, is why we’ve chosen to donate to this particular charity...

Why we’re supporting Colour Blind Awareness

Scot says: “I’m one of the 1 in 12 men that suffer from colour blindness, it also affects 1 in 200 women.

I was quite fortunate though, as my Colour Vision Deficiency (to give it its proper title) was picked up at my primary school in Scotland by the Ishihara tests – you may remember them: those pictures with coloured dots where you have to try to pick out numbers in them. The tests are designed to separate those with normal colour appreciation from those like me, with the congenital deficiency.

How this affects me varies from being embarrassed at not being able to see what others can, to being frustrated that it’s automatically taken for granted that everyone can see colours. It even causes issues when businesses don’t make any allowance for people like me that struggle.

On the flip side, it can also create the occasional funny moment for me and my family when it causes amusing mishaps!”

How colour blindness can impact sufferers

You may be surprised to learn how many ways colour blindness can affect the lives of sufferers. Here are a few examples:

• Inability to distinguish traffic light colours, safety warnings and colours on graphs and charts
• Problems in education where colours are used to aid learning or used on examples papers
• Career limitations – no chance of being a pilot, train driver, electrician, air traffic controller and many others
• Difficulty choosing clothing and décor
• Unable to use the ‘colour test’ to check if meat is cooked or fruit is ripe

Another huge stumbling block is the lack of accessible websites, designed to enable easy reading and navigation for colour deficient users.

As part of the finance and protection industry, we firmly believe there should be no barriers to accessing quality advice and information. So we’ve built our website to ensure accessibility for colour blind users – and we’re pretty sure that’s a first within our field!

Using our business charity donations to help

The Colour Blind Awareness organisation was founded in 2010 in order to provide information about colour deficiency and support to sufferers – especially to children and their families and teachers.

Just like our mortgage and protection experts here at Cox & Flight, the organisation is committed to making a positive difference. Which is why we’re proud to be strong supporters of this organisation and to pledge our allegiance by selecting them as the recipients of this year’s annual business charity donations.