Analysis of automated contrast checking tools

Abstract

Creating web pages with information that is perceivable has to be a priority concern in their development. One of the main factors impacting the ability to read text in web pages is the contrast between the text's foreground and background colors. A number of automated tools have emerged to help web page designers create pages that abide by the minimum contrast requirements, established in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. We studied a subset of these tools to understand their current limitations. To help us achieve this goal we created a set of test cases exploring the different ways in which foreground and background colors can be mixed in web pages. We found that current tools can assist in detecting poor contrast in web pages, but have a clear limitation when evaluating text over images and text inside images.