How is color an important tool for accessibility?

  • Having a high contrast design makes your content more accessible for people with low vision or colorblindness.

When authoring chapters in Pressbooks:

  • Ensure high color contrast of text, diagrams, charts, etc.
  • Do not rely on color alone to convey meaning
  • Check the color contrast using a tool like: WebAIM Contrast Checker

When using the Visual Editor to write and edit content in your book chapter, use the the Text Color and Text background color formatting options to make color changes.

When adding Textboxes to your chapter, use the preset textbox styles which are accessible. If you customize your textbox color, ensure that there is good color contrast.

Bad Example of Using Color in Pressbooks

In this example, the color of the text in the next sentence is of two different colors, but there is little contrast between the two.  Here is the sentence with bad color contrast. In addition, the text is not underlined or in bold, which means that readers must rely on the color difference only to see differentiation.

Good Example of Using Color in Pressbooks

In this example, the color of the text has a lot of contrast with the background (white) and is not combined with other colors of matching contrastIn addition, the text that is a different color is also bold or underlined, which means that readers aren’t relying solely on the color difference to see that there is a differentiation in this section of the text.

 

 

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UW Libraries Pressbooks Accessibility Guide Copyright © by Lauren Ray; Sena Crow; and Melanie Smith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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