Color in Digital Design: Unpacking Usability, Accessibility & Universal Design

Editor’s Note: This article reframes our previous “How To Use Color To Improve Usability” post, updated for April 2025 to reflect the current understanding of inclusive design principles.

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Why do some color palettes just work while others fall flat? The difference lies at the intersection of form and function.

Color shapes how we feel and where we look. But effective color design balances three key principles:

1. Usability: Can people accomplish tasks efficiently?
2. Accessibility: Does it work for everyone, regardless of ability?
3. Universal Design: How might one elegant solution serve the broadest audience?

These aren’t separate constraints but complementary lenses that create experiences that look great and work better for everyone.

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Defining the Concepts Through Color

Color & Usability: Ease of Use

Usability applies color to create intuitive hierarchy, guiding attention, basic readability, and clear interaction patterns.

Usability focuses on designing for effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction for intended users under specified conditions. When applied to color, traditional usability principles emphasize:

• Visual Hierarchy: Using color intensity and contrast to guide attention naturally through an interface.
• Attention Direction: Employing vibrant colors to highlight essential elements like calls-to-action.
• Basic Readability: Ensuring sufficient contrast between text and backgrounds for comfortable reading.
• Interaction Guidance: Using consistent color patterns to indicate interactive elements (blue links, vibrant primary buttons).

These usability-focused approaches primarily optimize for the “typical” user experience, making interfaces intuitive and efficient under standard conditions.

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Color & Accessibility: Equitable Access

Accessibility transforms subjective “good design” principles into objective, measurable criteria that ensure digital products remain usable across diverse abilities.

Accessibility, often guided by the foundational POUR principles (Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust), shifts the focus to ensuring equivalent experiences specifically for users with disabilities. For color, accessibility introduces formal requirements:

• Contrast Ratios: Meeting established guidelines for text and UI elements against their backgrounds.
• Non-Color Indicators: Following WCAG Success Criterion 1.4.1, which prohibits using color alone to convey information.
• Redundant Cues: Implementing patterns, shapes, text labels alongside color to support users with color vision deficiencies (CVD) or low vision.
• Systematic Testing: Verifying designs through color blindness simulators and contrast checkers.

Accessibility mandates objective criteria for color: meeting contrast ratios, using non-color indicators, providing redundant cues, and systematic testing. Meeting current Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1 Level AA) standards of 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text (typically 18pt or 14pt bold). Striving for the enhanced Level AAA standard (7:1 for normal, 4.5:1 for large text) provides even better readability for more users.

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Color & Universal Design: Design for All

Universal design broadens the scope: ensuring color choices are perceptible in all conditions, equitable across vision types, and intuitively understood.

Universal design (UD) takes a more holistic approach, proactively designing products and environments to be usable by the widest possible range of people in the broadest range of situations without requiring adaptation or specialized design.

When applied to color, universal design principles include:

• Perceptible Information: Ensuring color conveys information effectively regardless of ambient conditions (bright sunlight, dim lighting) or user abilities.
• Equitable Use: Creating color systems that work equally well across diverse vision types.
• Intuitive & Straightforward: Developing inherently understandable color patterns that don’t require specialized knowledge.
• Tolerance for Error: Preventing confusion or mistakes that might result from color-based decisions.

Universal design incorporates “color universal design” (CUD) principles, such as selecting robust color palettes, integrating shape/line/pattern alongside color, and clearly labeling colors when necessary.

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How They Work Together: Overlap & Hierarchy

Accessibility Is Foundational To Usability

Accessibility and usability aren’t separate domains but interconnected frameworks that build upon each other. A product inaccessible to millions of potential users fails the basic usability test of effectiveness for intended users.

If significant user groups (like people with disabilities) cannot effectively use a product due to color barriers, the product isn’t truly usable. Rather than viewing accessibility as simply a subset of usability or a “nice to have,” it’s often foundational to genuine usability.

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Universal Design As an Elevated Goal

Universal design (UD) inherently incorporates accessibility principles but aims higher, seeking solutions that work for everyone from the start. Instead of treating disability as a special case requiring accommodation, UD recognizes the spectrum of human abilities and designs for that diversity by default, often naturally fulfilling accessibility requirements.

Inclusive design, a closely related methodology, similarly embraces the full spectrum of human diversity, often with a strong emphasis on co-designing solutions with users representing that diversity.

Key takeaway: Designing accessibly often creates universal usability benefits, like high contrast improving readability for everyone in bright light.

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Shared Benefits Across Domains

Many color considerations initially driven by accessibility concerns benefit all users, illustrating the “design for one, benefit many” principle often seen in inclusive practices: 

• Using high contrast ensures text readability for everyone, even in bright sunlight.
• Employing multiple indicators provides clear status information for all users.
• Applying consistent color patterns reduces cognitive load for all users, enhancing cognitive accessibility.

Re-examining Examples Through Multiple Lenses

One element, three perspectives: usability, accessibility, and universal design analyze color choices differently. Let’s analyze common color usage patterns through the lens of each framework.

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Contrast in Text & UI Elements

• Usability Perspective: Text should be readable against its background to support efficient scanning and reading.
• Accessibility Perspective: To comply with WCAG standards, text must meet specific contrast ratios (4.5:1 for standard text, 3:1 for large text).
• Universal Design Perspective: Text should remain readable across diverse lighting conditions, screen types, and vision abilities without adjustment.

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Status Indicators & Icons

• Usability Perspective: Make selected states pop through a clear color distinction.
• Accessibility Perspective: Never rely on color alone—incorporate shape, position, or text.
• Universal Design Perspective: Integrate multiple cues naturally so status is clear regardless of how it’s perceived.

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Call-to-Action Buttons

• Usability Perspective: Highlight primary actions with vibrant colors that draw attention.‍
• Accessibility Perspective: Maintain high contrast both within buttons and against the surroundings.‍
• Universal Design Perspective: Create a clear visual hierarchy that works across contexts and vision types.

From Compliance to Strategy

The progression from usability to accessibility to universal design shifts color from tactical choice to strategic inclusion:

1. Usability optimizes for typical scenarios.
2. Accessibility ensures equitable access for all abilities.
3. Universal design embraces human diversity from the start.

While understanding these distinctions helps clarify design objectives, aiming for universal design principles or embracing an inclusive design methodology, from the start, often creates the most effective path to digital products that are accessible, usable, and delightful for the most significant number of people.

Rather than treating these as separate concerns (“we need to add accessibility now”), a unified approach to color in digital design can satisfy all three frameworks simultaneously, creating products that truly work for everyone. 

A good starting point is to always check your primary calls-to-action for WCAG-compliant color contrast.

Further Resources

• The Importance of Color in Design: Explore the fundamentals of color theory, psychology, and branding in digital products.
• App Accessibility: Our comprehensive guide to making apps usable by people with the broadest possible range of abilities.
• Creating Accessible Color Systems: Our guide to building inclusive color systems that address diverse vision needs while creating strategic advantages for your product.
• My Meals My Way Case Study: See how universal design principles guided our development of an accessible meal-planning app featuring customized profiles, dynamic type, and multisensory tutorials.
• The Latest Advances in App Accessibility Features: Explore cutting-edge technological advancements in accessibility and the strategic business case for implementing them.