How to Fix Color and Contrast Problems

Low-contrast text turns up on the large majority of home pages, year after year, which makes it the most common failure anybody measures. It is also the one people assume a machine settles for good. It does not. Where some of the pixels behind a line of text pass and some do not, there is no clear method for deciding whether the text is legible. So a green tick from a contrast checker is not the same thing as a met criterion. The techniques here cover meeting the ratios and pairing color with a second cue, so meaning never rides on hue alone. The same goes for the shape, size and position cues that 1.3.3 covers, which is a different criterion from the color one and sits here because the fix is the same move. The rest are about letting people apply their own colors, and the failures that come from text over images and from links marked by color alone.