Goal
- Provide good readability of your content.
- Limit the mental load while reading.
- Improve the accessibility of content for people with disabilities.
Implementation
Be sure to maintain a minimum contrast ratio of 3: 1 between text and its background, as measured using the WCAG2.0 algorithm.
Control
On all pages:
- Identify content where the difference in contrast/brightness with the background may be insufficient
- Use a tool such as Color Contrast Analyzer to calculate the contrast ratio: click on Brightness and note the foreground colour then the background colour in the fields for this;
- Check that the contrast ratio recorded is greater than or equal to 3:1
In the case of text on a graduated, patterned or photographic background, take the colour measurement of the background at the most unfavourable point adjacent to the text (for black text, the darkest pixel). It is advisable also to consider that the user may enlarge the character size (only zoom the text), which may cause a change in the text/background overlay.
Business application and benefits
The rules should be applied to your projects from the design phase through to post-implementation , and they should be understood by all professionals with web and customer experience (CX) responsibilities: from strategy to operations, marketers to project managers, and editorial to technical staff. The benefits of using this ruleset are numerous, including improving customer satisfaction, web performance, and e-commerce, and expanding your client base, while also decreasing your errors and costs.
The objective of these rules and the Opquast community mission is ‘making the web better’ for your customers and for everyone! Opquast rules cover the key major areas of risk that can negatively affect website users such as privacy, ecodesign, accessibility and security.
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