The internet revolution has paved the way for websites – providing a digital medium for businesses to present and promote themselves. And more recently, web or digital accessibility has reveived significant attention.
With the implementation of the European Accessibility Act (EAA), there’s been a lot of emphasis on the way organizations and global businesses use their content on websites or other online mediums. While various factors affect digital accessibility, one of the key parameters that has a significant impact is color contrast.
In this article, we delve into the core issues affecting web accessibility, color contrast, how contrast affects digital accessibility, legal aspects of contrast, ways to make your websites accessible, and more.
Let’s get started.
What are the core issues in effectively implementing digital accessibility?
Digital accessibility is essential; however, some issues act as hindrances. Some of these are:
Missing or Irrelevant Link text
Most visually impaired persons refer to links, highlighted in bold or color, to understand what they comprise. However, websites with missing or vague link texts, such as “click here” or “enter” don’t serve the intended purpose, causing difficulty accessing the content.
Inappropriate fields in forms
Most websites require users to complete forms in order to access a service or gather information. Often, the visitors start to fill in the form only to find that it has errors or empty labels. This is another cause affecting digital inaccessibility.
Inaccurate HTML content structure
Websites are more user-friendly and interactive when they provide a proper HTML content structure.Without this structure, the screen readers, which help people with disabilities to read, won’t work properly, thereby causing problems in accessibility for the visually impaired.
Poor color contrast
Of all the problems experienced in digital accessibility, poor color contrast is the most prevalent. A study shows that nearly 83% of webpages have problems with low-contrast text, which in turn results in digital accessibility.
How does color contrast impact digital accessibility?
Color contrast is a key factor in ensuring the effectiveness of digital accessibility. The impact of contrast varies from person to person, depending on their visual needs, and issues. For example, people with visual impairments may experience color contrast as the variation between navigating a site that’s easy to read and one that is not clear.
Within visual impairment itself, there are multiple issues like myopia, hypermetropia, or diabetic retinopathy, which affect people in different ways. These categories of people generally have difficulty reading the text when the contrast is low.
Yet another case is the people suffering from color blindness. In this case, if color contrast is low, they will not be able to differentiate between two colors that are almost identical in illuminance.
Finally, the eyesight problems that arise due to aging are equally impacted by color contrast. Studies show that as people grow older, they experience a decline in contrast sensitivity, which in turn poses problems in seeing low contrast content clearly.
It’s been observed that among all categories, older people experience extremely low contrast sensitivity. Therefore, if websites aren’t crafted to suit the right contrast, your business can potentially lose significant visitor traffic.
What does WCAG say about color contrast?
In simple terms, color contrast refers to the luminous difference or variation in the light between the foreground and the background of text or other elements. Color contrast plays a significant role in ensuring the legibility and the ease with which text can be accessed or read on websites or other media.
According to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), people suffering from vision problems like low vision, color blindness, or aging factors have some dependencies on contrast, which must be met to ensure they can read the content properly. The prescribed guidelines state,
- normal text must adhere to a ratio of at least 4.5:1 (adhering to Level AA of EAA), and
- large text (18 point or larger or 14 point or larger or bold) should have a contrast ratio of at least 3:1.
In addition, WCAG also mentions an “enhanced ratio”, which requires a contrast of 7:1, adhering to Level AAA of EAA. It’s worth mentioning that these ratios aren’t randomly stated; instead, they have been arrived at after a lot of study and experiments, and are designed to suit the web accessibility needs of various categories of people.
Essentially, a contrast ratio of 4.5:1 is good for people with a 20/40 vision, while that of 7:1 is recommended for people with around 20/80 vision.
What are the measures to enhance the accessibility of websites?
Websites are one of the most important ways for companies to interact visually with their audience. Therefore, your website needs to provide digital accessibility to all people equally.
Some pointers that can help are:
- Ensure that various areas of your website – blogs, contact, footer, menu, home, etc. are visible as they must be easily accessible.
- Use color contrast when creating brand colors and themes.
- Black text printed on a white background offers the best readability
- Warm and cool colors provide the ideal color contrast.
- Keep links on websites underlined so that they are easy to find by people with visual impairment.
- Besides the usual red-green color alerts to assess the success/failure of your site, offer other ways. That’s because people with color blindness can’t identify the variation and therefore will not be able to evaluate the site properly.
WCAG’s color contrast exceptions:
Certain text or images do not need contrast requirements. This includes text or images –
- contained within an inactive UI
- Not visible to anyone
- Part of a logo or brand name
- serving a cosmetic purpose
Are there any legal issues associated with color contrast requirements?
In 1990, the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of disability. It doesn’t include any specific legal guidelines for the internet or the implementation of digital accessibility. However, the Department of Justice (DOJ) uses the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as an international standard for digital accessibility.
WCAG is used worldwide as a guideline in legal settlements as a part of the ADA. Conversely, adherence to WCAG is mandatory for ADA compliance.
Wrapping Up
Recently, the concept of digital accessibility of web content has become very important. Under the ADA, WCAG guidelines are used in legal settlements and lawsuits. Businesses must keep their websites accessible by following the guidelines outlined in this article to remain competitive.