Color Contrast Checker by Colorwheels
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Contrast Score
Excellent contrast for all text sizes.
What is color contrast?
Color contrast is the difference in lightness or brightness between two colors, which usually refers to the foreground and background color. Having a sufficient color contrast makes your design stand out from the crowd and improves the readability of your content. In other words, insufficient color contrast results in colors starting to blend, and important details like text messages will be missed out on by readers.
How to use our color contrast checker?
Our color contrast checker is based on Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to check the accessibility and readability of a color combination used in text and background. Input the hex codes of your background and text color, then you will see the color contrast scoring next to it.
Play around with the colors to find the best complementary colors for your text and background. Remember that the higher the contrast ratio, the better the readability and accessibility!
WCAG contrast compliance
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is a set of recommendations to build a safer and more accessible online space for people of differing abilities. To ensure accessibility for those with vision or color deficiency, WCAG provides a minimum contrast requirement between text and its background color.
There are three levels of contrast compliance based on WCAG 2.0 guidelines:
AAA is the optimal level of compliance with a score range of 7.0 and above
AA is the acceptable level of compliance where accessibility and readability are sufficient for the majority of people with or without vision impairment
A is the minimum level of compliance with a readability score range between 3.0 to 4.9
Measure of text readability
Text readability refers to how easy a person can read a text, and color contrast is one of the critical factors when it comes to ensuring good text readability. Low contrast makes the text hard on the eyes, causing people to feel strained and frustrated to understand the message you are trying to convey. Having a good contrast ratio between text and background makes content easier to discover and focus on, which helps to increase the likelihood of returning visitors to your content.
Based on WCAG minimum contrast requirement, it is essential to have a contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text. The rule of thumb is that the higher the contrast score, the better the readability.
Color contrast ideas
Here are 5 basic types of color contrast to get you started:
1. Analogous colors or contrast of hue
2. Light and dark color contrast
3. Cold and warm color contrast
4. Complementary or split-complementary color contrast
5. Monochromatic colors or contrast of color saturation
Explore Colorwheels's color wheel to create your contrasting color palette or learn more about basic color theories, color inspiration, and more!