Re: Color Visibility

Hi Chris

My first inclination would be to test for "browser safe palette colours" in
the background and foreground text. They exclude the colours unique to each
browser but include those colours that stay consistent across browsers
without dithering. If memory serves, they are the colours represented by
every 3rd jump in hex values:

R   G   B
00 00 00
00 00 33
00 00 66
00 00 99
00 00 cc
00 00 ff
00 33 00
00 33 33
...
ff ff ff

You can see this palette at: http://www.lynda.com/hexv.html

Lynda Weinman has written some books on web colour. I believe her book
"Coloring Web Graphics" has samples of suggested colour families.

Another author, Crystal Waters, has written a chapter called "Color &
Contrast" in her book, "Universal Web Design she says:

"What color combinations are the most readable? It's generally accepted that
the best color scheme for reading is black text on a white background [...]
high contrast... However, because a person viewing a monitor is staring
straight at a light source, black text on a white background isn't the most
comfortable to look at for long periods of time. It can help readers if you
take the contrast down just a touch, especially if you're asking them to
read a lot of text. This could also mean using a light color rather than
white in combination with black (either as a background or text color).
On-screen, it generally seems that black and yellow make the highest
readability combination."

(pg 188)

I believe that she has written a couple of books on web design, one of them
about accessible web sites. You might be interested in contacting her at
crystal@typo.com. She might be able to provide you with exactly what you are
asking for in your note.

Hope this helps

Bill
=====================
E-Ramp: www.eramp.com

Access Empowers People
Barriers Disable Them

-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Ridpath <chris.ridpath@utoronto.ca>
To: Bruce Bailey <bbailey@clark.net>; WAI ER IG List <w3c-wai-er-ig@w3.org>
Date: Thursday, May 20, 1999 4:29 PM
Subject: Re: Color Visibility


>It seems that there HAS been research into which colors are good and bad
for
>visibility, such as what is described at the Lighthouse site. But this
>doesn't carry over very well to the task of text displays on computer
>monitors. We need to know the RGB values that make up good/bad color
matches
>so that we can test web pages for visibility.
>

Received on Thursday, 20 May 1999 17:50:33 UTC