WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: help understanding color contrast

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: May 8, 2013 11:25AM

The formula in WCAG creates a defined and absolute threshold. Anything
below the threshold fails and anything above it passes. Of course real
life accessibility doesn't work like this. It's not like a color
combination that marginally fails in totally unreadable or
'inaccessible'.

Common sense is necessary in considering the real end user feedback.
How big is the text? How much text is there? Body text that marginally
passes will cause more issues than heading text that marginally fails,
for example.

So use the guidelines as guidelines, not as die-hard rules. The
formula is not perfect. I'm not sure if it is by design or not, but
reds (orange, maroon, etc.) are much more difficult to meet the
minimal thresholds than most other colors.

Jared