Are you considering accessibility and energy efficiency when making color choices? (2024)

FAQs

How do you choose colors for accessibility? ›

Best Practices

Choose a color scheme that provides high contrast between the text and the background. If you have a dark background, the text should be light, and vice versa. (Black and white provide maximum contrast.)

Choose a lighter color for your roof to decrease heat gain

Dark colors include black, dark gray, and brown. Lighter hues include white, light gray, and light tan —these colors reflect more heat than their darker counterparts.

How paint color impacts home energy. The color of your home is directly related to the amount of heat absorption. According to the Department of Energy's (DOE) Cooling Your Home Naturally report, dark, dull colors can absorb 70 to 90 percent of the sun's radiant energy, which can then be transferred into the home.

Choose Accessible Color Combinations

Look for color combinations that have high contrast between them as this makes it easier for users to differentiate between foreground and background elements. An easy way to test contrast ratios is to use a color contrast checker; aim for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1.

Sufficient colour contrast between background and foreground is important to make content visible to everyone. Web Accessibility Perspectives: Colours with Good Contrast video shows why good colour contrast is essential for some and useful for all.

Choose a dark color for your text and a light color for your background, or vice versa. Avoid certain color combinations, including: Red and green — approximately 5% of people can't distinguish between these colors.

Different colors of light have different wavelengths and energy. (Human eyes detect differences in wavelength and energy as differences in color.) Light toward the red end of the spectrum has longer wavelengths and lower energy than light toward the violet end of the spectrum.

Yellow has been psychologically proven to boost energy, awareness, and even metabolism! It stimulates our creative process, which can help us get “unstuck” and make quick decisions. It's a seriously powerful color when it comes to colors that represent positive energy.

In the world of design, colour choices are used to associate brands with specific characteristics or emotions. These cues can be taken from nature, for example fresh green, dangerous red and sunny yellow, while some come from society, like regal purple or feminine pink, for instance.

What Does Accessibility Mean? Accessibility is a measure of how useable a computer system is to all people, including those with disabilities or impairments. It concerns both software and hardware and how they are configured in order to enable a disabled or impaired person to use that computer system successfully.

What is the theory related to accessibility? ›

Accessibility theory (Higgins, 1996 (Higgins, , 2011 ) provides a framework for understanding how the social context affects downstream attitudes and behaviors through the activation of trait dispositions.

Accessible design is a design process in which the needs of people with disabilities are specifically considered. Accessibility sometimes refers to the characteristic that products, services, and facilities can be independently used by people with a variety of disabilities.

For your colours to be AA accessible they need to have a contrast ratio of at least 3:1 for graphical elements, and 4.5:1 for normal text. An area chart visualization showing three examples of colors and whether they pass or not.

Off-white backgrounds are better for people with perceptual differences, like dyslexia. Select templates and themes with sans serif fonts that are 18 points or larger. Look for solid backgrounds with contrasting text color. To make information more accessible, differentiate it in more than one way.

How does impaired vision affect reading? Text should be printed with the highest possible contrast. There is good evidence that for many readers who are older or partially sighted, light (white or light yellow) letters on a dark (black) background are more readable than dark letters on a light background.