Colour Blind Awareness Day 2020
Colour Blind Awareness Day 2020 (6th September) coincided with UEFA Nations League fixtures that were played during the first week of September. This was an excellent excuse for TACBIS partner National Associations and clubs to use their matches as an opportunity to promote the cause. The Iceland v England and Portugal v Croatia matches on September 5; and the Belgium v Iceland, Denmark v England on September 8 fixtures were the focal point for campaign posts and activation.
The main objective for TACBIS for Colour Blind Awareness Day 2020, the first Colour Blind Awareness Day of the project, was to raise the profile of the condition in a football context as widely as possible across the European football community.
With this objective in mind The FA and UEFA, supporting partners of the project, gave permission for TACBIS to adapt their animated infographic with a European twist enabling TACBIS to create versions in 11 languages – English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Croatian (the official UEFA languages) plus versions for each of the native languages of the project partners – Danish, Icelandic and Romanian.
The partners of the #TACBIS project (funded by @EuSport) are proud to support #ColourBlindAwarenessDay 2020 @colourblindorg @EFDN_Tweets @footballiceland @selecaoportugal @Randers_FC @hai_romania @oxford_brookes @UEFA @FA. Please 👀 & RT our animation 👇
— TACBIS (@TACBISproject) September 6, 2020
#1in12men #1in200women pic.twitter.com/qkIk1uDwho
National Associations also encouraged Ambassadors to promoted Colour Blind Awareness Day and the TACBIS project on personal social media accounts. For example Bruno Fernandes of Portugal engaged 650,000 views with a single Instagram post on his personal account. The BBC article on the Colour Blind Awareness Day gathered over 1 million impressions (here) whilst the UEFA article gained over half a million impressions.
The hashtag TACBIS gained 2.75 million social media impressions and a reach of 1.4 million on the day. This enabled #ColourBlindAwarenessDay to reach 12.6 million social media impressions in 2020.
A range of short, animated videos (Gifs) showing how different football situations might appear to people with colour blindness were also created and distributed widely on social media.
How many red and orange cones can you see? pic.twitter.com/tXiePzLX7n
— ColourBlindAwareness 🇺🇦 🌻 (@colourblindorg) September 6, 2020
Kathryn Albany-Ward, founder of Colour Blind Awareness and expert in the field, further explained the importance of raising awareness for stakeholders in the sporting industry.
“In the EU, close to 34 million people have CVD (colour vision deficiency) – and failure to acknowledge the difficulties they face in sport risks alienating them in significant numbers, meaning they are likely to turn off TV coverage and take to social media to vent their frustrations. So, it is in sport’s best interests to resolve these issues. The good news is that implementing procedures to assist and protect those with colour blindness in sport is relatively simple. Much of the time, all that’s needed is a little goodwill and forward planning, and solutions can have positive benefits for teams, fans, sponsors, and broadcasters.”
Kathryn Albany-Ward, CEO of Colour Blind Awareness
The days leading to Colour Blind Awareness Day 2020 on September 6, saw UEFA, along with the support of national associations, clubs and players highlight the issue in order to raise awareness of the condition, investigate the prevalence of CVD among sportspeople and identify barriers to progression, among other objectives. UEFA’s Colour Blind Awareness Day press release can be accessed here.
BBC Sport too, released a feature article on the issue – regarding kit clashes and fan struggles. Read it here.
