Use of Color

A practice that people have used ever since we have been able to present text in different colors is to use color to create meaning within a document. Most often, we see things like important text colored red to make it stand out, or maybe an important piece of good news is colored green.

However, users who can’t see the color don’t benefit from the information that the text marked read is important. Luckily, HTML gives us some other tools to mark a piece of information as important.

Strong and Emphasis

The <strong> and <em> (for emphasis) tags mark the text that appears between the starting and ending tags as either important or emphasized.

To a visual user, strong text is presented as bold, and emphasized text is presented as italicized. It’s actually still possible to use simple bold (<b>) and italics (<i>) tags in your html, but those tags are deprecated in modern usage because they only indicate visual presentation for that text.  Strong and Em tags, on the other hand, can be used to provide different presentation across a lot of different forms of presentation.

So, in the case of trying to indicate something is important by making it red, we might also make it strong or emphasized.

Contextual Markers

It’s also possible to add contextual markers to indicate that a section of text is different from the text around it.  Text that says “Important Note:” and so on is an acceptable way to indicate that a piece of text is important.

Using Color is not bad

Using color is not bad — the problem only crops up when color is the only way that you are conveying meaning to your reader.  So, make sure that the information that a piece of content is different from the content around it is handled in a way that is not dependent upon color.

Color Contrast and Color Blindness

Another possible problem area for accessibility and color is the use of low contrast color combinations, or combinations that are not perceivable as different to users with color blindness.

In most cases, for users that are using a content management system, you will not be in a position to make dramatic changes to the color palate of your web site.  However, when you start to add color to your content, it’s a good idea to think about the color contrast of the choices you’re making.  Those considerations are outside the scope of this training, but in the conclusion we will provide links to some resources to help you consider color choices you’re making.