- [Instructor] 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.