What Color Accessibility Means in Web Design
Color accessibility means that design elements communicate meaning without relying solely on color. This aspect of accessibility ensures users suffering from visual impairments, color vision deficiences, or situational limitations can reliably and comfortably use your website.
Why Color Accessibility Is a Core Design Principle
Color accessibility functions as a core design principle because color communicates hierarchy, state, and intent across interfaces. This aspect of web design principles deals with catering to users suffering from a variety of color-based disabilities. Catering to these users impacts and influences decisions you make all throughout the design process.
Catering To Users With Color-Disabilities Is Important
Color-blindness makes up 8.5% of the population, so by failing to consider how your website looks to these users, you will hurt their experience. The severity of their color-blindness will vary. Of that roughly 10% user segment, some users cannot detect certain color differences at all, so ensuring your design can be converted via modern tools to have the same contrast and impact for these users is important.
How Color and Contrast Affect Usability
Color contrast directly affects readability, comprehension, and a user’s ability to complete tasks efficiently. The importance of color and accessibility isn’t specific to this 8.5% of your audience. You also need to ensure proper contrast with fonts, images, and elements as a whole. Color contrast directly affects readability, comprehension, and focus. Insufficient contrast forces users to strain or abandon content, even when the information itself is valuable. Users have grown accustomed to interacting with content that follows this convention, so the discomfort poorly contrasted text gives the user has become increasingly obvious. Today, given that it is a standard that your text should have proper contrast, if any text has poor contrast, it is seen as a sign of poor quality and unprofessionalism.
Color Contrast Requirements and Guidelines
Accessibility standards define minimum contrast thresholds to ensure text and interface elements remain detectable for the largest possible audience. These guidelines exist to protect usability outcomes, not to limit creative expression. If you fall below the threshold, the percentage of users who can comfortably read your content goes down dramatically.
Color Accessibility and Visual Impairments
Users with color blindness, low vision, or age-related changes perceive color differently than healthier, younger audiences do. Accessible design accounts for these differences by ensuring meaning is not dependent on color’s hue alone. By abiding by modern guidelines and accessibility standards, you’ll ensure audience segments of all ages and conditions can comfortably navigate and interact with your website.
How Color Accessibility Impacts UX and SEO
Search engines rely on structure and clarity in much the same way assistive technologies do. When color choices obscure meaning or hierarchy, both user experience and search interpretation suffer. Not to mention, roughly 10% of your audience will be significantly more likely to bounce and prefer competing websites that do cater to their disabilities. Meaning, more signals will be sent to search engines that 10% of your audience prefers your competitors, which will indirectly impact your rankings in favor of said competition.
How to Evaluate Color Accessibility on a Website
You can evaluate how accessible your color choices are by using one various websites, chrome extensions, or by inspecting elements inside of the DevTools console. The best way to check how accessible your color choices are would be to do it inside of Figma while your pages are being designed. Figma offers a variety of plugins you can use to test different aspects of your design for a variety of accessibility issues.
Accessibility and Color as an Ongoing Design Responsibility
Color accessibility must be revisited as branding, content, and interfaces evolve. A solid brand guideline document can help you keep these dialed in and controlled, but as you update your guidelines it is best to run checks periodically. Especially as the current and acceptable thresholds and standards evolve over time.
Improve Your Website’s Accessibility
If you want to improve your website’s accessibility, our web design services offer comprehensive and accessible solutions for all types of websites. Whether your website is built on WordPress, Webflow, Shopify, or even if your website is built from scratch.