Color Contrast

Designing so that people with disabilities can use a thing, and the standards that make it checkable.

Checking that people using screen readers, keyboards, magnification, or other assistive technology can actually use an interface, through a mix of automated scans and hands-on testing.

Difficulty and accessibility settings offered as separate, combinable toggles instead of one difficulty slider.

The button or link that asks a visitor to take the next step, such as signing up or buying, whose wording, prominence, and placement are heavily tested and easily turned manipulative.

The range of colors a device or color space can represent, drawn as a triangle of primaries inside the larger region of colors humans can see.

Serving an alternate palette for low-light preference, and the three states that implies.

An interface that exists inside the fiction, readable by the character as well as the player.

Refractive index varies with wavelength, so a medium bends colors by different amounts.

The curve mapping elapsed time to progress, and the main reason motion feels right or wrong.

The visible outline or highlight showing which element on a screen will receive keyboard input, essential for anyone who doesn't use a mouse, and for years routinely removed by designers who found it unattractive.

An interface style of translucent, blurred panels that let the content behind them show through like frosted glass, recurring across operating systems since the 2000s and repeatedly criticized for hurting legibility.

Representing and displaying brightness over a much wider range than the conventional 0–1 signal, so highlights can be brighter without the rest getting darker.

Two rearrangements of the RGB color cube into hue, saturation, and lightness or value, made in the 1970s so people could pick colors intuitively, which are convenient for color pickers but don't match how bright colors actually look.

Using movement to communicate change, continuity, and hierarchy rather than to decorate.

A perceptually uniform color space that makes lightness and chroma behave predictably.

Color is recoded after the cones into red-green, blue-yellow and light-dark opponent channels.

Light whose electric field oscillates in a preferred orientation, and the filters that select for it.

An operating-system preference signaling that animation should be minimized, for real medical reasons.

Offsetting the start of sibling animations so a group reveals in sequence.

Arranging elements so their visual weight matches their importance, telling the eye where to look first, second, and last.