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Colors & Accessibility

Did you know that 1 in 12 people have some sort of color deficiency? This episode discusses colors and web accessibility including color contrast, conveying meaning through color, and CSS colors.

Download Web Axe Episode 16

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3 replies on “Colors & Accessibility”

Hey Den!

Thanks for another good show. I look forward to many more.

If I remember correctly, you commented that using named colors are deprecated. Do you have a source for that information?

This prompted me to do some research and figure this one out. From what I’ve found, the CSS3 Color Module Recommendation has the same 16 standard colors that they had in HTML 4.01 (links below). (CSS 2.1 also has orange which is omitted from either of the other specs.)

Otherwise, it seems like some colors were added to the CSS3 Color Module. Look at the section on (SVG color keywords). It list a few dozen key words that are new to this specification. They are borrowed from SVG 1.0 spec and X11’s color list.

I think that it would be correct to say that using standard colors would be safe for browsers. Using only those 16 would be safest for now. (Except for devices that don’t support color!)

HTML 4.01 Spec – Sec 6.5 Colors
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/types.html#h-6.5

CSS 2.1 Spec – Sec 4.3.6 Colors
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/syndata.html#color-units

CSS3 Color Module – Sec 4.1. HTML4 color keywords
http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/CR-css3-color-20030514/#html4

CSS3 Color Module – Sec 4.3. SVG color keywords
http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/CR-css3-color-20030514/#svg-color

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