Understanding Color Accessibility And Why It Matters
You can tell when colors don’t work together. Objects almost seem to move when your eye tries to focus on them. The clashing colors cause visual tension that makes it uncomfortable to look at. In your gut, you know you don’t like the combination, but you may not know why. You’re likely recognizing bad color contrast.
Color accessibility focuses on using color combinations that have a significant contrast allowing people with visual impairments to more easily understand the information. Having accessible colors on your website, social media, and branded materials matters because readable, usable information is critical for effective communication and design. Effective color usage promotes inclusivity and ensures equal access to information and services online.
WCAG 2.1 AA Standards
These are considered the standard requirements in numerous countries and organizations around the world for legal accessibility. In a nutshell:
WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
WCAG levels range from A to AAA based on how well the content follows the guidelines outlined
A - the minimum, basic level of compliance
AA - middle-level and widely accepted as legally compliant (this is what we use)
AAA - the highest and most optimal level of accessibility
(Note: W3C, World Wide Web Consortium, develops these specifications as well as guidelines on privacy, security, and internationalization standards and has since 1994. A PLETHORA of information and updates can be found at www.w3.org.)
Confession: We don’t use WCAG AAA
All of our palettes are thoroughly tested to meet or exceed AA color ratio standards to ensure a balance between accessibility and unique, flexible design.
When building our brands and color palette options, we test each individual color against each other to ensure our clients have usable colors. We create a visual cheat sheet with approved color pairings and combinations for applications. This way, our clients aren’t constantly testing for accessibility or using unreadable contrast ratios.
Color Impacts
Prioritizing accessibility can support your business in other ways, like positively impacting your search engine optimization. Accessible websites usually provide a better user experience. When the user experience is good, people will spend more time on the site and bounce rates reduce which enables the potential for increased organic traffic. All of these factors naturally improve SEO.
Color Check: How to know if your colors are accessible
When in doubt, test it out! Don’t just assume brand colors you paid another designer for are accessible– CHECK! You can see if your colors are compliant and usable with one another. There are also recommended contrast suggestions to improve the color ratio.
Colors are a powerful tool used to communicate, emote, resonate, and inspire. Colors can bring an idea to life. Your brand colors should tell part of your company’s story and be appealing for users. Don’t underestimate your colors, prioritize them.
