Choosing the right colors for your eLearning projects isn’t just about making your courses look great. It’s about ensuring your content is accessible to everyone, including learners with color vision deficiencies, while meeting Section 508 accessibility requirements.
During my Articulate Storyline 360, Adobe Captivate, and TechSmith Camtasia training classes, we frequently explore the importance of color, contrast, and accessibility. After all, even the most visually stunning course can fall short if some learners struggle to see or distinguish its content.
With that in mind, I’ve put together some excellent color resources to help you make smarter, more accessible design choices—whether you’re working toward compliance, trying to create the perfect color palette, or simply staring at a color picker wondering why there are 16 million options, and none of them look right!
If you’re color clueless and are not already working with a set of brand-specific colors, this would be an excellent place to start. Click a color and you’ll be presented with complementary colors. Explore the Color Harmony area for even more colors that work well together.
Found a color you think could work for your design? Great! Enter that color’s hex code into the Color Wizard to start having some real fun.
Based on your starting color, this tool will show you coordinating colors in the monochromatic, analogous, triadic, tetradic, and split-complementary ranges, along with their hex codes.
It may be easy to figure out what the complementary colors are for red or blue or purple, but what if you have a gray-blue-green color in a muted hue? Then it might be a little harder to figure out what the perfect complimentary color would be. That’s where the color wizard can help.
Plus it’s nice to see your colors laid out together before you dive into the actual designing.
All right, so you’ve picked some colors. Now for the technical stuff. If you have perfect vision, a color combination might look great to you. But what about your viewers with less than perfect vision? Or those with low-resolution monitors? It might not look so hot to them. An easy way to tell if your colors have enough contrast is to plug the colors’ hex codes into Colors on the Web’s Color Contrast Analyzer.
The Color Contrast Checker will assess your color selection from an accessibility standpoint, based upon the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. The highest level of conformance is AAA, but whether you need this much contrast will depend on your audience.
How to Use These Colors In PowerPoint
Let’s say you use these tools and come up with the perfect color scheme. That’s awesome! What’s not-so-awesome is that PowerPoint’s colors are in RGB, and the Colors on the Web colors are in hex code. Don’t fret, just head off to this free Hex-to-RGB Conversion site (or any other conversion site that works for you), plug in your hex code, and it’ll spit out the RGB values for you.
very attractive tool of e learning that give attractive environment to user
very attractive tool of e learning that give attractive environment to user
very attractive tool of e learning that give attractive environment to user