Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Web Accessibility: Contrast

This is part of a continuing series of web accessibility tips for IT personnel, web managers and web development groups. These tips can be used to review current website accessibility and to utilize in developing new websites with the hope of improving web accessibility for everyone.

Determining whether there is enough color contrast between text and background can be difficult. WCAG 2.0 has contrast guidelines at both level AA and level AAA and a complex formula for determining a contrast ratio. Large text (over 14 point bold) requires slightly less contrast than 'normal' text.There are many tools, such as WebAIM's color contrast checker that can generate this contrast ratio and give immediate feedback whether the contrast is sufficient. Simply enter a foreground and background color to see the results. Users of the Firefox web browser can use the Colorzilla add-on too easily select color values from within the web page.

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