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Colour contrast on tempertemper.net

Posted in Accessibility, Brand and Design

Over the last year I’ve been keen to practice what I preach where it comes to accessibility on my website. It has always been pretty solid, but it’s something I never quite made the time to give proper attention to. This has always a rankled as I’m a big proponent of accessibility on the projects I get paid to work on, so it should be the same for my personal stuff!

Accessibility is easy to design/build in when you’re working from scratch, but when you’re dealing with a years-old website that has had changed a lot over those years, it’s trickier.

Well, I’m please to say that tempertemper.net is now WCAG Standard AAA compliant for colour contrast.

Over the course of this year, I’ve been busy fixing all sorts of small accessibility issues on tempertemper.net but colour contrast felt a bit more complicated (you’ll soon find out why), so I put it off. But I’ve finally bitten the bullet and addressed it, and I’m pretty pleased with the results.

It’s all about that blue I use for my brand. It comes from an for-screen approximation of the CMYK (print) value for pure cyan – CMYK(255,0,0,0). That was something I thought was quite clever: I’d never have to pay the printers extra for a Pantone colour to avoid those tiny dots. But I don’t remember the last time I actually had anything printed, so I’m not sure how useful that has actually proved!

The problem with cyan

The main issues I was facing were:

  • #0097db against white (#ffffff) had a contrast ratio of 3.25:1, which passed WCAG Standard AA for large text but failed AAA
  • #0097db against #2c2c2c, the background I use for the Dark Mode variant of my website had a contrast ratio of 4.28:1, which, again, passed WCAG Standard AA for large text but failed AAA

Deque University defines large text as:

18pt (24 CSS pixels) or 14pt bold (19 CSS pixels)

The smallest text on my website on the smallest screens comes out at 19.2px, so I’m more than confident I meet AA accessibility. But I want AAA.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t

So I needed to find a new brand colour that:

  1. Was accessible to AAA against a light background (#ffffff)
  2. Was accessible to AAA against a dark background (#2c2c2c)
  3. Still looked on-brand

I spent a long time trying colour after colour but anything that satisfied two of those criteria failed the third. It was clear that I was going to have to use two separate colours in order for my site to be accessible to AAA.

The web is about flexibility

Designing for the web is an exercise in letting go of things looking exactly the same everywhere – we have different screen sizes, operating systems, browsers, screen resolutions; the list goes on. Colour is one of the most wildly variable things, even when you look at higher-end displays where a 2015 MacBook Pro has a very different feel to a brand new MacBook Pro with True Tone.

Is it easy to tell the difference between the blue I’m using with a dark background and the blue I’m using with a light background? Maybe. One’s brighter and the other’s duller. But they’ll always be used in isolation. Just as no normal user resizes the screen to see how a site might adjust for mobile, nobody (except the likes of me) is opening their System Preferences window over a website and toggling between light and dark modes.

Loosening up

hover, focus and active states on links and buttons meant I was already using a slightly darkened or lightened variant of my brand blue, so I had already deviated slightly from that one colour in certain circumstances. This meant I felt comfortable enough to go a wee bit further use one colour against a light background and another against a dark in order to meet AAA and still look on brand in both cases.

I kept the same hue (the H in HSB) value and was able to keep the same saturation (S) value in all but one situation, then simply adjusted the brightness (B) to increase the contrast depending on the background colour.

This held true across the site, from links in text, header links, form inputs, buttons; even with variants of all those things on the box-out panels which use a very light blue background in Light Mode and a slightly lighter dark-grey in Dark Mode. I ended up with six colours in total: three for Light Mode and three for Dark Mode, with a primary, lighter variant and darker variant for each. Here’s what my SCSS looks like:

// Default/Light Mode colours
$colour-primary: #007CBA; // HSB(200,100,73)
$colour-primary-lighter: #008DD1; // HSB(200,100,82)
$colour-primary-darker: #0073AB; // HSB(200,100,67)

// Dark Mode colours
$colour-dark-mode-primary: #00A0F0; // HSB(200,100,94)
$colour-dark-mode-primary-lighter: #19B3FF; // HSB(200,90,100)
$colour-dark-mode-primary-darker: #008FD6; // HSB(200,100,84)

As close it’s possible to get is good enough

It has to be said that the slightly darkened blue looks a bit less vibrant than the original against a white background. I’m conscious of this but not too worried – there was always going to be a compromise somewhere.

I’m also aware that the lighter blue on a light background and the darker blue agains a dark background doesn’t quite meet AAA, but I only use these for hover states, where they user has already identified a link or clickable area.

Users first

So I’m ok with using two variants of that cyan if it means a better experience for some users of my site. And if I ever decide to get a run of business cards again, I’m going to steam ahead with CMYK(255,0,0,0) anyway – it’s close enough!

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More posts

Here are a couple more posts for you to enjoy. If that’s not enough, have a look at the full list.

  1. Alt text for CSS generated content

    There’s an interesting feature in Safari 17.4 that allows content added with CSS to have ‘alt’ text. I’m not sure how I feel about this.

  2. The accessibility conversations you want to be having

    In most companies, accessibility conversations centre around WCAG compliance, but that’s just the start. Thinking beyond that is where you want to be!