TS 853

TS 853 is a standard on safety colours, focusing on the use of colour as a highly visible means of indicating the presence of hazards and helping to identify their nature. In technical environments, safety colours serve as a visual signalling language: they can draw attention to risk, mark equipment of special safety importance, and show the location of items or areas that need to be recognised quickly. As a general concept, the standard addresses colour-based identification and warning practice.

What safety colours do in practice

In workplaces and industrial installations, colour coding is used to support rapid recognition of hazards, controls, emergency equipment and protected areas. Colours such as red, yellow, green or blue are often associated with different kinds of safety meaning in broader engineering practice, but colour alone does not eliminate danger. It is one element of a larger safety system that also depends on placement, consistency, legibility and appropriate context. The technical value of safety colours lies in immediate visual communication.

Technical scope reflected by this edition

• Safety colours used to indicate the presence of hazards
• Colour use that helps show the nature of a hazard visually
• Identification of equipment or locations of special safety importance
• General principles of colour-based safety marking

This record represents a withdrawn TS edition identified as equivalent to ISO/R 408:1964. It is useful as a historical technical reference for how safety colour concepts were organised, but it should be understood as a document about signalling and identification rather than a means of removing hazards themselves.