Color Contrast
To ensure that both low vision and colorblind users can access your site properly, you need to have the proper contrast between the foreground and the background. The Arts & Sciences theme has been designed to meet color contrast standards so you should not try to manually change font colors as it may cause accessibility issues and not match with the colors used in the site. However, if you are adding custom logos, graphics, or graphs, you should test the contrast between the text and background. Remeber, craphs and charts can be hard to understand for those who are color blind or have vision loss. Since meaning is often conveyed exclusively through color, textures, patterns, or shapes along with high contrast colors can help communicate the information. One way to test this is through printing out your chart or graph in black and white to see if you can still understand the information.
If you need to test color contrast, there are several free tools available:
WCAG 2.0 Guidelines for Color Contrast
- Large Text: Large-scale text has a contrast ratio of at least 3:1. Large text is defined as 19 pixels and bold or larger, or 24 pixels or larger.
- Normal Text: Normal text has a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1
- Incidental: Text or images of text that are part of an inactive user interface component, that are pure decoration, that are not visible to anyone, or that are part of a picture that contains significant other visual content, have no contrast requirement.