Forum Discussion
New in Rise 360: Theme Contrast Control
Contrast plays a significant role in the learning experience. If your text doesn’t stand out enough from the background, your learners will struggle to absorb your content. And that’s not what you want!
But now thanks to Theme Contrast Control in Rise 360 you can make sure that when text or icons appear on top of the theme color they meet contrast guidelines automatically. This includes things like:
- Course titles
- Lesson headers
- Navigation buttons
- Progress indicators
- Dividers
- Checkboxes, numbers, and bullets in list blocks
- Etc.
To use this new feature, simply go to the Themes tab, select Colors, and choose one of the following options:
- Auto: Turns text and meaningful graphics to black or white automatically depending on your theme color to meet the minimum accessibility contrast requirements at 4.5:1 ratio. We recommend using this option when possible to ensure everyone has a good experience with your course.
- Dark: Turns text and meaningful graphics to black.
- Light: Turns text and meaningful graphics to white.
Once you’ve made your selection, it’s automatically applied to text and icons that appear on top of your theme color throughout your course all at once, saving you a ton of time and ensuring everyone can easily read your content.
If you’re an Articulate 360 subscriber, you can access this new feature immediately in the theme settings of any Rise 360 course. And if you don’t have Articulate 360 but want to try out this feature, you can start a free 30-day trial.
Once you’ve given it a try we’d love to hear what you think! Please share any feedback or suggestions in the comments below. We’ll be working on enhancements for this feature and want to know if there are areas for improvement or additional functionality that you’d like to see. We’re looking forward to your feedback!
The Rise 360 Team
This is great, but it still would be nice to be able to control the colours of the text on buttons and other sections - as well, the bullets in lists? Could you also allow the colour of font to be set for a theme in that same section? For some reason the default is always this dark grey but we'd love to be able to set it from the beginning!
Hi there, Dan! As soon as you mentioned how this change affected your courses, our team put our heads together to determine how we could best resolve this for you and any other authors who relied on transparent images having a white background.
We decided to solve this in two steps:
- Step 1 (Done): We reverted the change we made. Now, cover images with transparency will have a white background, just like they did before.
- Step 2 (In Development): We're looking at ways we can provide an option to preserve transparency if authors actually do want a transparent cover image. We'll follow up in this thread once step 2 is complete.
Please have a look at your courses that use transparent cover images, and let us know if you see the white background again. I'll be standing by for your reply!
Hurray! My Theme colors are usually on the darker side, so the old default white text provided enough contrast. But I've seen other posts about the need for this feature, so I'm sure people with lighter brand colors will be happy to see this.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and feedback, Judy and Susan!
I'll forward these suggestions to the team, and we'ill keep this thread posted on updates on these feature requests.
Have a lovely day!
This change came with a change in the background color of the cover image. Before it had a transparent (white) background, now it is the theme color. This ruins hundreds of courses I designed. This change frustrates us and creates a LOT of extra work. Rise is limited as it is, why limit it even more? How can we revert this change? Thank you!
Hi there, Dan. I'm so sorry this change negatively affected hundreds of your courses. Transparency in cover photos should have always been respected, but we had an unknown bug which caused transparent images to have a white background.
With this recent update, image transparency now works as it always should have, but we realize that there are authors like you who want transparent cover photo images to have a white background.
Our team is looking into options for how we can give you more flexibility around this. I don't have any further details or an ETA to share right now, but I promise to keep you posted on new developments.Hi Alyssa, thank you for letting me know that it will never be done.
I recently purchased Rise 360 with an educational discount. When I go to change the theme, the only that that changes with the 3 options is the font. Could this be because I have the education discount? I added an image to show the only themes that are available.
Hi Wendy! Three themes are available in Rise, but each one is customizable. You are given the full version even if you got the education discount.
More information on the three themes available can be found here.
Here's how to customize the theme you selected.
I hope this helps you!
Hi, my theme colour is off-white, so while most things look normal, some buttons or interactions have this off-white colour over white, with no apparent way to adjust it. Setting it to light or dark doesn't help since it makes other parts low-contrast.
This violates WGAC and is a bit of a headache, so I kindly but seriously recommend introducing something to detect these kinds of low-contrast text, or better, have an option for secondary theme colours.
Thanks
Contrast control has been a great improvement. If the same principle could be applied to the colouring of selected radio buttons etc in the knowledge check, that'd improve accessibility further.
