And 5 steps for a quick accessibility fix

96.8% of home pages had detected WCAG 2 failures! (https://webaim.org/projects/million/)

Colour contrast, is one of the easiest accessibility errors to fix. There’s hundreds of tools to use, one of my favourite is https://color.cloudflare.design/. You can paste in your website URL and check your websites colours for accessibility. This provides you with the contrast of not just your text, but other elements, such as, forms, buttons and icons.

A full list of colour checking sites and apps are listed at the bottom of this page 👇

What can we do?

(in 5 easy steps)

Top tools for checking your sites accessibility

Accessibility insights: You can use this tool to check your accessibility of Android apps, websites Windows apps. This tool gives you fixes that take less than 5 minutes.

Lighthouse: Using directly from the Developer Tools in Chrome or by adding the extension made the Google team.

Examples of how colours look with different conditions of colour blindness

If you want to watch these tips

Colour contrast checking tools

Accessibility Color Wheel: Test and tweak colour choices, simply move your mouse around the colour wheel and evaluate for readability. At the bottom of the tool’s web page, you’ll see simulations for particular forms of colour blindness.

Accessible Color Generator: by Learn UI Design

Accessible color palette builder

Accessible Colors | WCAG 2.0 AA and AAA color contrast checker: evaluate your colour combination using the WCAG 2.0 guidelines for contrast accessibility. If your combination does not meet the guidelines, this tools finds the closest accessible combination by modifying the colour lightness, modifying the lightness value only, in order to stay as true to the original colour as possible.

APCA CONTRAST CALCULATOR

Brandwood A11y : Text on background image a11y check

Button Contrast Checker by Aditus

Check My Colours: Check My Colours is a web-based tool for checking your website’s foreground and background colors. It’ll check all stacked web page elements based on W3C’s WCAG recommended luminosity contrast ratio and colour brightness. It’s easy to use: just plug in your web page’s URL, press “Check!”, and it outputs a nice tabular report for all elements.

Cloudflare Design: A great tool to analysis your websites colour pallet for use with text, icons, button and forms.

Color Contrast Analyzer: A Chrome extension allowing for checking contrast from the browser.

Color Contrast Checker: This tool tests the contrast of a background colour and foreground color for accessibility.

Color Contrast Checker: by Level Access.

Color Contrast Checker Tool | Accessible Web Helper Extension: A Chrome extension allowing for checking contrast from the browser.

Color Contrast Tester: By Joe Dolson

Color Laboratory: This uncomplicated web tool allows you to discover colour combinations and how they might look like to a person with colour blindness. colour Laboratory is very easy to utilize and only requires three basic steps, all of which are outlined in their quick start guide.

Color Oracle: Color Oracle is a desktop tool available for Mac, Windows, and Linux operating systems: it simulates colour vision deficiencies on any screen or programme, this means you can check if your next PowerPoint or Keynote presentation is accessible and that graph makes sense to someone with colour blindness. The creators of the tool also have a Design Tips section on their site that shares a couple of useful whitepapers on colour accessibility. (Note that Windows and Linux users require Java 6.)

Color Palette by A11y Rocks: This tool helps you visualise an entire palette of all colour combinations with accessibility in mind. The combinations are ordered by colour contrast ratio.

Color Palette Contrast Checker: From deque lab’s git repo

Color Review

Color Safe: Empowering designers with beautiful and accessible colour palettes based on WCAG Guidelines of text and background contrast ratios.

Color wheel, a color palette generator | Adobe Color: Colour wheel (or image in Extract Theme tab) can be used to generate colour palettes, which can be saved into Creative Cloud. You can then use your saved color themes, in Adobe products (Photoshop, Illustrator, Fresco etc.), via Adobe Color theme panel or CC Libraries.

ColorA11y : Chrome extension

Colorblind Web Page Filter: It is a colour tool that allows designers the ability to see if they are meeting the needs of users with colorblindness.

ColorBox: by Lyft Design.

ColorCube: A color A11y Tool for Designers & Developers.

ColorShark – WCAG 2.1 AA and AAA Color Contrast Tool: Easily test your design colours for contrast accessibility and automatically find the closest accessible colours.

Colour Contrast Analyser: This desktop application (for Windows) is designed for examining your foreground and background colour combos for colour contrast and brightness. There’s a user guide on the site to help you get started with it quickly, as well as downloads available in several languages.

Colour Contrast Check: The first really intuitive online tool for checking colours that I know of, Jonathan Snook’s Colour Contrast Check lets you input foreground and background colours either by entiering hexadecimal values or by adjusting sliders. The tool gives you immediate feedback by showing what the chosen colour combination looks like and whether it passes the test.

Colour Contrast Determinator: Colour Contrast Visualiser This tool is an Adobe AIR desktop application for visualizing appropriate colour combinations. It’s a great tool for picking your website or brand colour palette. If you’re concerned about web accessibility, it’d be a good idea to have this tool around during the design phase of your projects.

ColourCode: It is an all-in-one colour design tool where you can find different palette categories (analogic, triad, quad, etc.), multiple conversion colour, and even download your custom palette.

https://usecontrast.com: This Mac app and Figma plugin (coming soon) allows you to eye-drop any colour and check the contrast of the foreground and background colours.

Contrast Checker: by Courtesy of Acart Communication This tool is built for designers and developers to test colour contrast compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These calculations are based on the formulas specified by the W3C.

Contrast Ratio: Easily calculate colour contrast ratios. Passing WCAG was never this easy! by Lea Verou.

contrast-checker: by GOV.UK

Contrast-Finder: Contrast-Finder is a tool which computes the contrast between two colours (background, foreground) and checks if the contrast is valid.

Deque Color Contrast Analyzer: Free online tool for evaluating colour contrast according to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

EightShapes Contrast Grid: Test many foreground and background colour combos for compliance with WCAG 2.0 minimum contrast.

Free Color Contrast Checker and Accessible Color Pallet Generator: by HolisticA11Y. This colour checker will help you identify if your coloura meet WCAG colour contrast requirements.

Generate Accessible UI Colors with a11y-color-tokens: Generate accessible complementary text or UI colors as Sass variables and/or CSS custom properties from your base colour tokens.

Hex Naw

HTML Color Codes : From dan’s tools (thanks to dan, whoever he is!)

Leonardo: an open source contrast-based color generator

Luminosity Colour Contrast Ratio Analyser: Juicy Studio has a nifty web tool for analyzing background and foreground colour contrast ratio. All you need to do is key in your background and foreground colour values in hexadecimal units (for example, a white background is #ffffff) and it will subsequently tell you whether the combination passes WCAG 2.0 contrast recommendations.

Monsido’s Color Contrast Checker: Monsido’s Colour Contrast Checker tests the contrast of background and text for accessibility. Users can use it to visualize different colour combination palettes for their website design that are in compliance with WCAG, EU directive, and ADA standards.

Pika: An open-source colour picker app for macOS. Pika (pronounced pi·kuh, like picker) is an easy to use, open-source, native colour picker for macOS. Pika makes it simple to quickly find colours onscreen, in the format you need, so you can get on with being a speedy, successful designer.

Sim Daltonism: Sim Daltonism is a vision deficiency simulator for the Mac OS X. The tool allows you to simulate one of the eight supported colourcolour blindness conditions such as Monochromacy and Protanopia (a dichromat condition). Please note that Sim Daltonism requires Mac OS X 10.2.8 (or later versions).

Tanaguru contrast finder

The Contrast Triangle: Removing underlines from links in HTML text presents an accessibility challenge. In order for a design to be considered accessible, there is now a three-sided design contraint – or what I call “The Contrast Triangle”. Your text, links and background colours must now all have sufficient contrast from each other. Links must have a contrast ratio of 3:1 from their surrounding text. This is so that colorblind users can tell what pieces of text are links. By not using underlines, a design has to rely on contrast alone to achieve this. Even the default blue link colour in browsers doesn’t meet this contrast level. Both the text and links have to have a contrast ratio of 4.5:1, or 3:1 if it’s large scale text.

WCAG Color Contrast Checker | Accessible Web: This Colour Contrast Checker tool utilizes the same rulesets as Accessible Web’s Chrome extension but doesn’t require adding anything to Chrome. To test whether your colour scheme conforms with WCAG color contrast guidelines, just enter your color combinations or use the dropper tool to select colors off a webpage.

WCAG Contrast checker : Firefox plugin

WebAIM Link contrast checker : Checks contrast of links

WebAIM: Color Contrast Checker An online colour Contrast analyzer from WebAIM.

Whocanuse.com? It’s a tool that brings attention and understanding to how colour contrast can affect different people with visual impairments.