Color Contrast Deep Dive¶
Contributed by Jen Sanders
Welcome to MarkDownTown
Overview¶
Color contrast can make or break a user's experience to do a variety of factors. Technical communicators need to keep everyone in mind when choosing colors for their document or website. This includes the general audience, but people who have disabilities that affect their ability to see colors.
Key Takeaways¶
The contrast ratio is a way to know whether two colors go well together.
Things that can go wrong with bad color contrast¶
- Plane crash
- Frustrated color-blind customers
- Frustrated non-color-blind customers
- People laugh at your bad color contrast (new google logos are bad)
- Unquantifiable damage to your brand (new google logos are bad)
Reflection¶
Choosing the right colors is something that I struggle with. Twice I've been working on a project and when I try to show it to someone, all they can focus on is the terrible color choices. Thus I have learned from experience how bad color contrast can distract and frustrate the user, and keep them from experiencing what your website has to offer. Especially in projects for my computer science courses, I always think of colors as an afterthought. I still think it is best to choose colors after you get the darn thing working properly, but you must also code in a way where the colors are easy to tweak.