Color Accessibility Tools for Web Designers

Selecting web colors for the general population and color vision deficiency users can present some challenges. In order to satisfy both audiences (as well as client needs), the web boasts some free tools to help designers make sound choices.

Using the accessibility standards set by the WC3 (World Wide Web Consortium) Contrast-A (a.k.a. Dasplankton) is a website that provides tools to build, preview, save and print custom color combinations all on-the-fly. With a highly functional and well designed interface, Contrast A offers a feature for producing hardcopy of your chosen swatches with a key indicating proper contrast for WC3 compliance. The site also displays text sampling of body copy and the ability to save custom palettes.

For launched websites, checkmycolors.com will do an audit on foreground/background colors as well as DOMs (Document Object Model). After the review, the website builds a laundry list of all hex colors with their corresponding HTML usage. Contrast ratios, brightness and color differences are rated with a check mark (for passing) or an “x” (for insufficient contrast). To double-check those colors that don't pass, just click once on the “x” mark and you will be presented with a breakout of the brightness, color difference and luminosity/contrast ratio. Whether you're hired to finish a website already started, or make improvements to an existing site, checkmycolours will do the job for making those last minute tweaks for WC3 compliance.

Another Pinboard to Follow

Having resisted Pinterest for about a year now, I finally dipped my toes into the virtual pool of pinboards. My apprehension was truly misdirected and I've come to find that the concept of organizing visual images/links onto a virtual board has become a great teaching tool. After covering the typical graphic design topics such as typography, and history it was a natural move to include color among the related topics. So here is a link to my All Color Matters pinboard .

Color from the Ordinary Made Into the Extraordinary: Fabian Oefner

From motor oil to evaporated alcohol Fabian Oefner wields these materials as if they were ordinary pigments found on an artist's palette. Known for driving a Ferrari into a wind tunnel to splatter with neon paint, Hefner does't shrink from using unconventional materials to pursue his fixation with color. Hefner's latest series “Photographic Paintings” was an outgrowth of observing the oxidation of b ismuth that he had melted on a hotplate. The cooled compound created amazing iridescent spectrum of color. Oefner quickly realized that a scraped off layer with a spatula would change the colors and that they would on be present for a brief tine. " You get those colors, which are essentially the colors of the rainbow,” he says. The photographs have a minimal amount of digital editing done to them. Hefner's work suspends your fools us by taken advantage of the interplay of poss...

Color

Taking a more fine art approach, Color draws from past, and present art movements for aesthetic examples on basic color theory application. In depth chapters explore topics such as psychological/compositional effects, color relationships, subtractive/additive media, fine art and applied design. Where Color Workbook by Becky Koenig takes a more “hands-on” approach to color theory, Color presents the realities of color uses from a working artist's point-of-view. Other subjects mentioned include computer art, video, architecture, landscape design, sculpture, and clothing. This book does fall short in two areas; cultural influences and the omission of any suggested exercises for students to back-up the text. This normally wouldn't be an issue, however given the high retail price of $93.00, it would be difficult to justify this purchase to the budget minded student unless it can be aquired via used or heavy discount. Color (Sixth Edition) by Paul J. Zelanski, Mary Pat Fishe...

All Color Matters

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