What to ask your agency about colour contrast

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on colour contrast, these questions are worth asking early.

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Body text needs a 4.5:1 contrast ratio against its background. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Contrast checkers take seconds and settle arguments. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

The short version

The measurable part of design is whether people can find what they came for and act on it without hesitating. Three things worth confirming about colour contrast before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Light grey on white fails more often than designers expect — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.