Accessible Colour

Accessible colour is essential for readers that are colour blind, but good colour practice benefits users printing in black and white, viewing in the sun with screen glare, using custom contrast settings, or experiencing other vision impairments.

Colour contrast is expressed as a ratio of the difference in saturation, brightness, and pigment of different elements relative to one another. To be accessible and inclusive, font colour must have a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1^[1] against background colours. In addition to ensuring text has sufficient contrast, it is essential that colour is not used alone to make a distinction, a comparison, or to emphasize information. Use colour plus a text or symbol indicator.

Who benefits from accessible colour

Accessible colour is essential for:

• The 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women that have some form of colour vision deficiency.^[2]
• Low vision users.
• Users experiencing eye fatigue and other mental strain.
• Those that print material in black and white.
• Users viewing in poor lighting or excess glare.

Learn more about accessible colour use.

The following video demonstrates why colour contrast and use of colour is important.

How to ensure accessible colour

On the Home tab, use Highlight Colour, Font Colour or Shading to create accessible colour combinations.

In addition to presets, Font Colour and Shading allow for custom colours.

A particularly useful feature is the High-contrast only toggle present on each menu:

This reduces the number of available colours to choose from to show only those that have sufficient contrast against any other colours present (such as Font Colour against Shading or Highlight Colour against Font Colour).

The Automatic font colour option ensures that when Shading, Highlight, or Page Colour change the font will automatically change colour to present an easier to read, accessible document.

General Tips

Use dark text on light backgrounds. Generally, it is not advised to change the page colour of Word documents. However, if the page colour is dark, use light coloured text.

Build a grid of branded colours with Eightshapes Contrast Grid to see what colour combinations are accessible.

Double Check

The Accessibility Assistant will note Hard-to-read text contrast errors for text colour contrast against page background, shading, and highlighting as well as cell text colour against cell shading in a table. To rectify this error, adjust colour choices as outlined above and read more about how to fix colour contrast issues in Word.