Color and Accessibility

throughout my work

Accessibility is a very important detail to UX design that is often dismissed. To ensure that my designs are within accessibility standards, I went through many color explorations to ensure that the brand colors were accessible throughout the site.

Accessibility Best Practice

  • you can impact someone’s life by making inclusive & easy to use products

  • one billion people have disabilities: your product can be used by them

  • better accessibility support leads to better UX and cleaner code

Why Accessibility?

Initial Color Explorations:

In my PearPals project, I was able to flesh out a simple branding kit focusing on the app’s purpose of socializing at events.

Taking the key words of friendship, energy, events, and activity, I came up with a set of color palettes that embodied those key words. Since purple is associated to power, wisdom, and spirituality while green has been found to be related to health, livelihood, and energy, I created a palette based on those colors.

Color Contrast Checker Results #1:

As seen above, the initial colors I had chosen did not pass this contrast checker in all four categories. This was interesting, especially since the colors looked legible from my point of view. This showed me that certain aesthetics have to be corrected in design in order to pass accessibility guidelines, despite how good it looked in my initial color palette.

How Did I Correct This?

To ensure that my colors pass the accessibility guidelines, I went back to the drawing board and experiment with stronger saturations of similar colors. In the end, I ended up with a darker, stronger purple that was used throughout the app for areas that required reading.

Revised color explorations:

Reflection

Throughout my projects, I am continuously learning about the WCAG standards, trying my best to keep these guidelines in mind while designing and knowing when it’s necessary to break them.

This is just a brief example of how I consider accessibility throughout my designing process. Other areas to consider are based on the product in question: Who are the users? What is their age group? What devices will be most likely displayed on?

In all things, learning accessibility standards allows me to continually think about the user’s needs as I design a solution for their pain points.