Using a color contrast checker can make your designs more attractive and accessible to people with vision problems. Worldwide, about 300 million people have colorblindness. About 2.2 billion people have vision issues that could make it difficult for them to use your digital products.

Understanding the positive and negative effects of some color combinations will put you on the path to reaching more people with your web and app designs.

Why use color contrast in product UI?

A color contrast checker can make your digital products better in at least two important ways.

Follow WCAG 2 guidelines to make products more accessible

WCAG 2.1 (web content accessibility guidelines) and Success Criterion set rules you can follow to make your products more accessible to people with a broad range of vision impairments.

Using a background color that blends in with text color can make it impossible for some people to use your products. Colorblind people might also have difficulty seeing text and images when you select a color that they do not perceive as the larger population does.

Something as simple as picking a different color can help people recognize:

User interface components
Web page content
Navigational menus
Logos

A color picker that considers accessibility makes it much easier for you to create designs that more people can use. You can check your designs in our built-in color blindness simulator and contrast checker that comply with all the WCAG 2 guidelines.

You can learn more about the topic by reading Things every designer needs to know about accessibility. It explains some of the ways you can help users by using large text and other features.

Reach a broader audience with color contrast

When you make your designs more accessible, more people can use your products. Ethically, you want to include as many people as possible because everyone deserves to enjoy using the same products. Financially, you want to include more people because it helps grow your business’s revenue.

Using color contrast attracts more users, which can lead to higher advertising revenues and more sales. It makes sense from ethical and business perspectives.

Know the three WCAG levels

WCAG has three levels. Aim to reach the highest level so you can make your designs as accessible as possible.

The following explanations only cover vision-based accessibility. You will need to think about other features before you can reach people with other accessibility restrictions.

Level A (Beginner)

The presentation doesn’t rely exclusively on color.

Level AA (Intermediate)

The color contrast ratio between the text and background color is at least 4.5 to 1.

The color contrast ratio between user interface components, graphics, and nearby colors is at least 3 to 1.

Text can double in size without losing function or context.

Level AAA (Advanced)

The color contrast ratio between your text and background is at least 7 to 1.

Color contrast checker tools to explore

If you don’t have any visual impairments that prevent you from distinguishing colors, you probably can’t identify whether you reach the minimum contrast unless you use a color contrast checker. The following tools can help you choose colors that improve accessibility for more people.

Colour Contrast Analyser (CCA)

Colour Contrast Analyser is a free tool that you can download to your computer. Enter the hex code, CSS color format, or use the color picker tool to get your contrast ratio and determine whether you pass AA or AAA standards.

Built-In Contrast Checker

See if your design tool has a built-in contrast checker to make it easier for you to evaluate the colors you used. At UXPin, you don’t need to search for plugins that will help you with that as it’s already there, in the editor.

Colour Contrast Check

Colour Contrast Check makes it easy for you to know whether your design is WCAG 2 AA or WCAG AAA compliant. Enter the hex value of your background and foreground colors. The results will give your contrast ratio and a simple “yes” or “no” regarding compliance.

Accessible Color Generator

Accessible Color Generator lets you enter a color by hex code or a color palette. It will analyze your color and give you a contrasting color that meets AA or AAA guidelines for small, large, or normal text sizes.

Color Laboratory

The Color Laboratory tool lets you choose colors to see how they look next to each other. It will also augment the colors you select so you can see them the way someone with colorblindness would. It can give you quite a bit of insight into how colorblind people experience your products.

Color Safe

Color Safe generates color palettes based on WCAG guidelines. Choose a color, your text size, and font family to get a color palette that complies with WCAG standards.

APCA Contrast Calculator

The APCA Contrast Calculator is a tool that stands out for giving you a simple and full font matrix version of its tool. If you just want to know whether your text size and color contrasts meet APCA standards, you can use the simple version. If you want to include more variables, try the full font matrix version.

Ensure proper color contrast with UXPin

UXPin lets you make prototypes that look and perform just like your final product. That way, you don’t have to worry about your color contrast changing between the prototyping and product release stages.

Try our 14-day trial to use the editor with a built-in contract checker and so much more! Sign up here. No credit card required!

Try UXPin for free

There’s no easy way to say this: Design tools have completely failed to deliver sufficient ways to help create accessible experiences.

All of these have existed as plugins or external programs. Until now.

Introducing the very first built-in Contrast Analyzer & Color Blindness Simulator in a design tool. According to WHO, over 1.3 billion people live with some form of vision impairment. Of that, 217 million with moderate to severe vision impairment!

Contrast Analyzer

Think about it—can everyone perceive your digital creations? Here’s where taking size and contrast of the elements of the user interface really counts. That’s exactly what our Contrast Analyzer was built for. Now, the WCAG contrast standard is used in our built-in, automatic linter. Right inside the UXPin design editor, you can specify whether to comply with either AA and AAA levels. It will automatically inform you when the design’s text can be easily read.

Color Blindness Simulator

And then there’s our new Color Blindness Simulator. Did you know that 4.5% of the world’s population has one of the types of color blindness? Moreover, a whopping 8% of the male population experiences a form of it! This huge number is too often overlooked by designers. Alas, the Color Blindness Simulator shows your design as perceived by someone with one of eight types of color blindness!

UXPin can simulate:

Four kinds of red–green color blindness
Two kinds of blue–yellow color blindness
Two kinds of complete color blindness

Hopefully, with this simulator at our fingertips in UXPin, we’ll all always make sure that people affected by color blindness can use and enjoy our digital creations.

Say goodbye to external accessibility checker tools and jumping between programs. Learn more about in in our CEO’s Medium article and check out the tutorial on how to use both.

No one should feel excluded from digital experiences by means of their visual, motor, auditory, speech or cognitive disabilities. Taking care of accessibility is an ethical imperative for designers. UXPin just took the first step. Let’s get to it.

Tag: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

Best Ways to Evaluate Your Design for Color Contrast