VIDEO TRANSCRIPT OF MAKING ACCESSIBLE COLOR CHOICES

As you create digital learning content or build a course, 
consider whether or not the color choices you've made will 
help make your content easy for your students to read. 

In this video, we'll take a look at options for color 
contrast and how to effectively emphasize text.

The use of good color contrast makes text easier to see. When 
considering contrast, compare the background color with the 
text color. A poor contrast between the two can make the 
content difficult to read.

But pairing a dark color and a light color often works well. 
For example, this document has a white background, so I'll 
use the default font color, black, to type text. But I could 
also use another color, such as dark purple, or perhaps 
brown. There's many colors that provide great contrast 
against a white background, but I'll stick with the default 
to make the document appear professional.

Let's see how this works in a presentation. This slide has a 
dark background, but the text is also dark. These colors 
don't provide very good contrast, so I'll change the font 
color to white. Difficulties can also arise when a  pattern 
or gradient is used as a background. Ideally, the background 
should be a solid color.

It's important to note that some people have Color Vision 
Deficiency, or color blindness, which affects how they 
perceive color. To them, red, green, or blue may appear muted 
or appear as another color altogether, so we'll need to avoid 
certain color combinations such as red and black, green and 
black, green and blue, or red and green. 

We'll also make sure that we haven't used color alone to 
convey meaning such as emphasis.

In my document, there's an important sentence that I want to 
make sure stands out, so I'll format it in red, but I'll also 
need to make it stand out in a way that doesn't rely on the 
red. So I'll also apply the bold font variation. There we go.

One last thing I'll check for is whether or not large amounts 
of text have been underlined. Underlining is usually reserved 
for hyperlinks, and we'll also want to make sure that bold 
and italics are used sparingly. So I'll have this block of 
text stand out by highlighting it and adjusting the margins a 
bit. 

That looks good.

Taking a few minutes to make sure you've made accessible 
color selections will help ensure that color won't be a 
barrier for anyone reading your content.