Accessibility
Palette Accessibility Audit
Evaluate every color pairing in a palette against WCAG contrast standards. Surface the strongest readable combinations, spot weak pairings, and understand your palette's accessibility profile. For pairwise testing, use the Contrast Checker.
Thinking in pairings
Why audit the whole palette
Checking contrast between two colors is useful — and the Contrast Checker handles that well. But understanding an entire palette's accessibility requires evaluating every pairing. A palette might look cohesive in a swatch grid but offer very few readable text-on-background combinations. This audit makes those relationships visible at a glance.
Reading the results
The summary tells you how many of the palette's pairings pass AA and AAA at different text sizes. The strongest pairings section surfaces your best options for body text. The contrast matrix shows every relationship at once — green cells pass, amber cells are borderline, and pale cells fail.
What the scores mean in practice
A palette with "strong" coverage gives you multiple safe text/background combinations — more flexibility for UI, editorial, and brand work. "Limited" doesn't mean the palette is bad — it may be excellent for accents, illustration, or data visualization — but you'll need to be careful about where you put text.
Accessibility is more than contrast
Contrast ratios tell you about readability. The Color Blindness Simulator adds another layer — showing whether colors remain distinguishable under different forms of color vision deficiency. Two colors can both pass contrast checks while looking identical under deuteranopia. Using both tools together gives a more complete accessibility picture.
From audit to application
Once you understand which pairings work, use the Token Mapper to assign accessible pairings to design roles. Preview the result on real layouts with the Palette Visualizer. Or generate new palettes and audit them here until you find the right balance of aesthetics and accessibility.