color contrast example

Using color is an excellent way to quickly visualize material, distinguish foreground from background, and emphasize the importance of something. But not all color combinations are created equal.

For example, the yellow text on a white background,

Yellow on white

creates very "low contrast" that is difficult to read.

White text on a black background

White on black

is a "high contrast" example.

Black text on white background is the default, and most commonly used, form of text color contrast.

A study by G. M. Murch (1987) about readings in human and computer interaction, compared various background and foreground text colors for readability, finding black text on a light green background as the most legible (100%), followed by blue text on a white background (94%), and white text on a black or blue background (75%).

Learners with dyslexia tend to prefer color pairs with a higher color and brightness contrast while people with dyslexia read faster when color pairs have lower contrasts. For instance, the color pair which was the fastest to read was the combination of black & crème. Black text over yellow background presents the largest fixation duration. The effects are similar to using a yellow highlighter on black text.

Try this Color Contrast Check tool (Links to an external site.)when checking contrast.