Accessibility Tip of the Week

In the grand scheme of colors.

  • Summary: Create accessible color schemes for your content.
  • Who it helps: People with limited vision or color blindness, and some neurodivergent individuals.
  • Additional benefits: It helps capture your audience's attention and improves readability outside and in other bright situations.

Developing a design system for a corporate brand, ad campaign, website, or similar project always involves color. Color is one of the most noticeable parts of any design, and choosing the correct color palette is an important part of a design theme.

  • Making the right color choices can increase brand recognition, invoke an emotional response, and support and reinforce the content.
  • Making the wrong color choices can prevent people with color blindness, low vision, and even some people who are neurodivergent from understanding your content.

While no one color theme can always meet the needs of everyone, a well-designed, accessible color theme can meet the needs of most people, most of the time. There are two guidelines to remember when choosing colors to build an accessible color theme.

  1. Use color combinations with good color contrast.
  2. Never rely on color alone to convey information.

What can I do?

As you pick your colors, keep accessibility in mind. We provide a detailed, step-by-step guide on .org . If you’ve never thought about your color scheme holistically, this is a great chance to do so.

  • Step 1: Identify Design Elements that Convey Content
  • Step 2: Choose Colors and Assign Them to Elements
  • Step 3: Check Color Combinations for Accessibility
  • Step 4: Adding More Colors
  • Step 5: Applying the Color Theme

If you already have a color scheme for your organization, consider using Eight Shapes to find out how to use the colors you have in accessible combinations.

This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0    .

If you are promoting accessibility within your organization or community, sending out easy-to-understand tips can be a helpful addition to your strategy. You are welcome to share the tips here under the mentioned Creative Commons license, as long as you cite Accessible Community as your source.