Back up color-coded text with another cue
G182 applies to colored text where the color carries information. Links inside a paragraph. Items in a list that differ from the rest. The instruction is to add a visual cue that does not depend on color, and W3C names several. Font style, an underline, bold, italics, a change in size. This is a sufficient technique for 1.4.1 Use of Color at Level A. One note on the W3C page deserves more attention than it gets. Meeting 1.4.1 with a visual cue does nothing at all for a screen reader user, because a font change is not announced. If the distinction matters to them, it has to arrive as text or as markup. That is a different rule and a different technique.
How we find it in an audit
Our reviewers look for the sentence that gives the game away. It is usually a legend reading 'items in red are unavailable' or something like it. Then we view the page in grayscale and ask whether the distinction survives. Where it does not, we ask what would reach a screen reader. A visual-only fix passes one rule and leaves another wide open.
How affected users experience it
Color vision deficiency affects roughly one in twelve men. Red against grey is one pairing that collapses. For a reader with deuteranopia, 'fields in red are required' is a sentence about something they cannot see. A bold weight, an asterisk, or the word 'required' in the label all survive, and the last one survives into speech as well.
Passes vs. fails
Passes
Required fields carry a bold label and the text '(required)', with the red kept as reinforcement rather than as the message.
Fails
'Fields in red are required.' For a reader with deuteranopia every label is the same brownish grey, so the sentence means nothing.
Other ways to satisfy this rule
9 guides on this site are filed under 1.4.1 Use of Color. W3C lists this one as sufficient for that rule on its own. Implement it correctly, in a way your readers' software actually supports, and the rule is met.
- G14sufficientSay in text what color alone signals
- G111sufficientPair color coding with patterns and shapes
- G183sufficientMake color-only links contrast and respond
- G205sufficientAdd text cues to color-coded field labels
- C15advisoryStyle the focus indicator instead of removing it
- F13failureDo not write alt text that drops color meaning
This guide is our interpretation of W3C technique G182: Ensuring that additional visual cues are available when text color differences are used to convey information. W3C publishes its techniques as guidance rather than as the standard, and says so on every one of them. The success criterion is what conformance is measured against, and a technique is one documented way to meet it.