Color blindness should be addressed in your communication and facilitation approach, whether you believe it to be a deficiency, an impairment, or a disability. Relegating color blindness to a legal deficiency means employers seldom test, hire, or accommodate it. If you do the same as the technical presenter, you will lose between 8 percent and 25 percent of your senior management audience. Few of us can afford to lose that many in our audience. Color Blindness and ADA The Ame

People who are color blind will have problems interpreting visuals that are highly dependent on color. The most common type of color blindness makes it hard to tell the difference between red and green. Another type makes it hard to tell the difference between blue and yellow. Although possible, it is rare to find people who do see color at all. However, using a black-and-white scale is a good starting point (and an easy one) to test whether your graphics have the desired imp

Resilience – the ability of communities, economies, and ecosystems within South Carolina to anticipate, absorb, recover, and thrive when presented with environmental change and natural hazards – is managed by multiple state and federal agencies. The South Carolina Office of Resilience’s well-done guiding graphic explains those separate and overlapping responsibilities to decision makers. The graphic is well done because it is decorative and also stays true to the credibility

Well, maybe not the absolute worst because I have seen some bad ones. But this one is in the Top 10. Good Intentions This slide was part of a larger, information-style presentation related to an environmental planning report. The slide was one of 37 slides. This slide was intended to show a quick summary of historical data, the completeness of the data, and that some data analysis was part of the planning efforts. Good intentions. Here is why the slide fails so miserably as e

The video graphic in a local news story raced by so quickly that I nearly missed the manipulation—the bar in the graphic animated quickly. The words that bridged the animation from the first bar to the second bar described a 17% increase between 2021 and 2022, but the graph implied something much different. And in less than 15 seconds, the difference in what the words were saying (17% increase) and what the graph was implying (more than doubling) triggered my brain to tell me

Making decisions in situations with high levels of complexity and uncertainty is iterative. The decision maker must understand the process and inter-relationships associated with the various components if communication is to be effective. In practice, a guiding graphic is needed to demonstrate the iterative nature of the work and the progress. The benefits of this type of graphic on smaller and less complex projects should not be overlooked. Management consultants and graphic

Getting a Sick Dog to the Vet I heard one of the beagles yelp. Josie came running to the house with a limp. She was wobbling five minutes later. Her gums were light pink within five more minutes. It was time to get to the veterinarian. The chief question was 'where'? We were not at home and we had never been to the vet in this town. I pulled up Google Maps. A red dot showed my location. The roads were light yellow, developed areas were light gray, the water was light blue, an