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Hearing loss affects an estimated 1.5 billion people worldwide, making it one of the most common sensory impairments globally. People who are hard of hearing experience a range of hearing ability — from mild difficulty following conversations in noisy environments to significant loss that makes understanding speech without assistance very challenging. Unlike people who are profoundly deaf and may identify strongly with Deaf culture and sign language as a primary mode of communication, hard of hearing individuals often occupy a space in between — able to hear some sound, frequently relying on hearing aids, cochlear implants, lip reading, and captioning to navigate a predominantly hearing world.

Colour blindness, more accurately called colour vision deficiency, is a condition where the eye’s ability to distinguish between certain colours is reduced or absent. It affects roughly 8% of men and around 0.5% of women of Northern European descent, with the significant gender difference explained by the fact that the most common forms are inherited via a recessive gene on the X chromosome. Because men have only one X chromosome, a single faulty copy is enough to cause the condition, while women need two affected copies, making it far less common in females.