Accessible Colors

When considering the accessibility of your presentation, there are two primary concerns:

• Using color exclusively to convey information (BAD)
• Ensuring adequate contrast between background and foreground elements.

PowerPoint Color Tools

PowerPoint provides the same color tools you are probably familiar with from MS Word. 

The locally-installed version of PowerPoint includes color tools under the View tab which allow you to quickly check for issues of color contrast with the different elements on your PowerPoint slides.

PowerPoint Online does not provide the color tools under the View tab.

Our Standard to Check Against

Remember, we have the WCAG 2.0 success criteria 1.4.3 (AA), which requires a color contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for all text excluding the following exceptions:

• Large Text: Large-scale text and images of large-scale text have a contrast ratio of at least 3:1.
• Incidental: Text or images of text that are part of an active user interface component, that are pure decoration, that are not visible to anyone, or that are part of a picture that contains significant other visual content, have no contrast requirement.
• Logotypes: Text that is part of a logo or brand name has no minimum contrast requirement.

MS Office Colors Hexadecimal Values

Many of the free color contrast checkers available on the web use hexadecimal format (web colors) to represent the colors you enter.  We will cover two examples in the next section.

Following is a table of the standard MS Office Colors with their corresponding hexadecimal values. This can be helpful with many of the free web-based color contrast checkers.

You can also open the file in MS Word Online: MS Office Colors Hexadecimal Values.docx

Theme Colors

Standard Colors

Check Your Contrast

Once you have finished putting your slides together, it is important to ensure you have sufficient contrast to satisfy the WCAG 2.0 AA requirements. Please note that these standareds are for the digital context of an individual at a computer screen, and they are not a guarantee that your slides will project the same contrast with the under-powered projector in the brightly lit meeting room at the Embassy Suites.

Color Contrast can be tricky, but thankfully we have a defined standard for color contrast, and we have free tools available to help us measure and determine whether we are meeting the standard.

WebAIM Color Contrast Checker

WebAIM provides a color contrast checker which allows you to enter the hexadecimal code for any web color: WebAIM Color Contrast Checker https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ Links to an external site..

Colour Contrast Analyser

There is a free tool from The Paciello Group that has become the standard for checking color contrast. It installs locally on your machine, and enables you to check the color contrast in any program on your computer.

The Colour Contrast Analyzer allows you to use your mouse to point and click on the colors in your text or background, which enables you to check images for color contrast in addition to digital text.

Download the Colour Contrast Analyzer:  https://developer.paciellogroup.com/resources/contrastanalyser/ Links to an external site.

Once you have installed the Colour Contrast Analyzer on your local machine you can use it to check the contrast of any color combinations visible on your computer screen.

Instructions for Using the Colour Contrast Analyzer

The following instructions explain how to use the Colour Contrast Analyzer:

1. Use the eye-dropper tool to select colors for the foreground and background (or enter hexadecimal values).
2. The tool will automatically assess the color combination and generate a report that includes your WCAG 2.0 status for AA and AAA.
3. Include contrast results for colour blindness to show contrast values for different types of color blindness.