A poor visual accessibility of the website can cause high bounce rates. A number of people who visit your websites might not be capable of distinguishing colors and hence, poor design can decrease their accessibility. If your website has very small font size that are barely legible or if there are too many distractions or improper white spacing, there are chances that most of the people can immediately leave your website without spending even few seconds. Another main reason for the frequent bounce rate is the implementation of poor color scheme that decrease the readability of the text. So, in this article, we shall particularly discuss about the importance of high contrast visuals in web designing.
Web Standard For Color Contrast
Colour contrast ratio in designing refers to the difference in contrast between the two colours. When the contrast ratio is more, it becomes easy for readers to distinguish between the text and the object. Different elements of the website look clearer with increased contrast like images and graphics and it also becomes easy to distinguish foreground and background.
There are a number of ways in which colors can have different impact on their visuals such as variation in the amount of hue, value and saturation. Color contrast ratio is calculated by the formula provided by W3C.
Advantages Of High Contrast Ratio
- It ensures better readability that not only engages visually impaired users, but also allows content readability to the small screen users such as smartphone or a smartwatch user.
- High contrast design also allows people access content even in bad lighting conditions or poor displays.
- Text with higher contrast can be read faster, thus allowing users to consume more information without getting bored.
Tips For Creating Visually Accessible Website
- In order to create a visually accessible website, one should avoid using only colour to convey functionality or the meaning. One of the typical examples is the icon that changes its color.
- It is always good to design additional visual cues which helps people (who see colours differently) in understanding the functionality.
- Focus on the colour contrast of buttons, links and menus, as they are the primary means of navigation on your site. If users are unable to navigate easily on your website, they would immediately leave. Another way is to look for accessible colours for designing call-to-action buttons as they are crucial for good conversion rates.
- Test colour contrast ratio as early as possible in the design process as it might be hard to convince your client to change the colour scheme of the site later on.
There are millions of visually impaired people around the world who are partially or fully have colour blindness. They perceive colors in different ways, so avoiding low contrast color in our designs is certain if we want to provide our customers with an accessible and user-friendly website.
