10 colour contrast checking tools to improve the accessibility of your design
At my dayjob we create the graphic design for most of our clients’ sites, but not for all of them. Sometimes the client or the client’s design agency creates the visual design and leaves conversion to HTML + CSS + JavaScript and CMS-ifying to us. When that happens, I almost always find problems with insufficient colour contrast in the design. Sometimes the problems are minor enough to be acceptable, but often there are areas that need to be adjusted.
In case you’re wondering why I care (and why I think you should care) about the colour contrast of a website, it’s very simple. If text does not have sufficient contrast compared to its background, people will have problems. People with colour blindness or other visual impairments as well as people browsing the Web under less than ideal circumstances (bad monitor, window reflections, sunlight hitting the screen) may not be able to read the text, at least not without difficulty.
And you don’t really want that, do you? If you publish text on a website, as most people do, I’m guessing that in almost all cases it is because you want [...]