Accessibility Color Contrast Tool

Instantly Check Your Color Contrast & Accessibility.

Analyze your color choices against universal standards for readability and visual impairment. Choose a text color and a background color to begin.

How This Tool Works.

This tool helps you create beautiful and accessible designs by analyzing your color choices against universal standards for readability and visual impairment. It goes beyond a simple pass or fail, giving you a complete picture of how users will experience your content.

Getting started is simple. At the top of the tool, choose a Text Color and a Background Color using the color pickers or by typing in a hex code. As you adjust the colors, all the results below will update instantly.

Understanding the Results.

The preview box immediately shows you how your text looks on your chosen background, giving you a real-time visual feel for the combination.

The Results Card.

This is the core of your analysis. It displays:

Contrast Ratio: The precise mathematical ratio between your two colors.
UI Component Contrast: A dedicated check to see if your colors meet the 3:1 ratio required for essential interface elements like icons and form borders.
WCAG Text Contrast: Four separate checks that show whether your combination "Passes" or "Fails" the crucial WCAG AA and AAA standards for both normal and large text sizes.

Color Blindness Simulation.

Great design is for everyone. This section simulates how your color combination appears to users with different types of color vision deficiency (CVD), including Protanopia (red-blindness), Deuteranopia (green-blindness), Tritanopia (blue-blindness), and Achromatopsia (monochrome/grayscale). This helps ensure your design is clear and effective for the widest possible audience.

What is WCAG? Understanding the Metrics.

When you use the contrast checker, you'll see references to "WCAG," "AA," and "AAA." Understanding these terms is key to creating designs that are not only beautiful but also usable for everyone.

WCAG stands for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It is the globally recognized, official standard for web accessibility, developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Its goal is to create a single, shared standard to make the web more accessible to people with disabilities, including various degrees of visual, auditory, physical, and cognitive impairments. For design, its guidelines on color contrast are the gold standard.

The Contrast Ratio.

The number our tool calculates, like 4.5:1 or 7:1, is the contrast ratio. It measures the difference in perceived brightness (or "luminance") between your text color and background color. A higher number means there is a greater difference between the two colors, making the text easier to read. A ratio of 1:1 would be white text on a white background, while 21:1 is black text on a white background (the maximum possible).

Understanding the Levels: AA vs. AAA.

WCAG has three levels of conformance: A (the minimum), AA (the standard), and AAA (the enhanced standard). Our tool tests against the two most important levels for contrast:

WCAG AA: This is the globally accepted standard for accessibility. Meeting this level is the goal for most websites, as it makes content accessible to a wide range of users without being overly restrictive on design choices. The required ratio is 4.5:1 for normal text.
WCAG AAA: This is a stricter, enhanced standard. It's often adopted by government agencies or organizations specifically focused on providing a superior experience for users with low vision or other visual impairments. It requires a higher ratio of 7:1 for normal text.

Why Are "Normal Text" and "Large Text" Different?

You'll notice the requirements are more lenient for "Large Text." This is because larger, thicker text is inherently easier to read, so it doesn't need as much contrast to be legible. WCAG defines large text as:

18pt (which is roughly 24px) or larger.
Or 14pt (roughly 18.5px) and bold.

A Note on UI Component Contrast.

Finally, the tool includes a check for "UI Component Contrast." This refers to a separate WCAG rule that focuses on essential graphical elements like icons, input field borders, and parts of charts, and making sure they have a contrast ratio of at least 3:1 against their background. We want to make sure that users can clearly see and interact with all parts of your interface, not just read the text.