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Re: Recommend efficient color contrast checker

for

From: Steve Green
Date: Jun 18, 2013 4:12PM

Thanks Ryan, that is really useful - we do a lot of testing in locked-down environments and I didn't know about the colour picker.

I just found an unusual behaviour that is worth knowing about. Unfortunately you can't use the arrow keys for fine control of the picker, so you have to use a mouse to position it precisely. It is then difficult to click the mouse to pick the exact pixel you want. I found that pressing the Enter key did not pick the colour, which was disappointing, but it does pick it if you press one of the arrow keys first - even though pressing the arrow key apparently has no other effect.

Steve Green


-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Ryan E. Benson
Sent: 18 June 2013 23:01
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Recommend efficient color contrast checker

While I may be laughed at for this, but there is a color picker in IE 8+, which can be used if you are in a location where you cannot install plug-ins. In IE, press f12 to bring up the dev tools. You can either press ctrl + K, or tools > show color picker, then paste in the value to WebAIM's or the checker of your choosing.

--
Ryan E. Benson


On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 1:35 PM, Jared Smith < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> Checking contrast for text in or on images is inherently difficult to
> do in an automated process - it's difficult to identify the image
> colors automatically, let alone know which of the image colors you
> want to test (not to mention complexities like gradients,
> transparency, etc.). In general, there will need to be some human
> component to this. There are, however, some tools to make this process
> easier. I highly recommend Colorzilla add-ons for Firefox or Chrome
> (http://www.colorzilla.com/). You can easily activate the tool, click
> on a location within an image, and Colorzilla will copy the RGB value
> of the point you have clicked to the clipboard, so you can then paste
> it into tools like the WebAIM contrast checker. I'm looking into
> adding a similar tool into WAVE so you can check image contrast right within the evaluation tool.
>
> Jared Smith
> WebAIM.org
> > > list messages to <EMAIL REMOVED>
>