Want more flexibility with accent colors to avoid contrast issues
Aug 19, 2022
I want to see how many other people have the same issue. Our company's primary brand color is an orangey-gold color. Our secondary colors are also bright, vivid colors that are great as decorative pops of color (accents). However, they are not great for accessibility when trying to use them as text colors against white backgrounds or as backgrounds to white text.
This isn't a concern with Storyline, PPT, or the vast majority of tools we use. It is a concern with Rise because, in many blocks, Rise forces the accent color for some elements and either you can't change it or the fix is a tedious manual workaround that you only know about by searching these forums. (See example image of a Timeline block at the end of this post.)
It creates a scenario where we have to be "ok" with the low contrast or change the accent to a darker shade that isn't as good as a decorative accent and may not fit our brand.
Despite many recent accessibility and decorative upgrades, I haven't seen this accessibility improvement on the Rise roadmap. Is this anywhere on the horizon?
6 Replies
Hi there, Scott. Thank you so much for bringing this up. Our team is looking at ways we can improve contrast in relation to course theme colors, so I'm going to highlight this as part of that discussion.
We'll let you know if we make any changes that will help!
Any new developments or plans on this front? My team is looking to adopt some of the new Rise theme options in 2023 and color contrast of text is still an issue we need to address.
Hi Scott.
Text Contrast Controls
Instantly ensure training content meets accessible color handling requirements for learners with low vision. Enhance course navigation buttons, cover pages, and headers so that light text automatically appears on dark colors and vice versa.
In development
See https://articulate.com/support/article/Articulate-360-Feature-Roadmap#rise-360
Awesome. Thanks, Karl for pointing this out to me.
As I chew on this more, the automatic text contrast changes like that are on some of the newer theme elements are fantastic, especially for elements like Continue buttons. Expanding it to all elements is a huge step forward.
However, there are cases when a color picker would be preferred so that the color is something other than the accent or black/gray and still fits in a style guide. For example, setting hyperlinks to be blue is our preference over our gold accent (low contrast) or black/gray (identical to the surrounding text). In this example, a global course setting to set a hyperlink color would be ideal.
Hi Scott! Thanks for this additional information.
We’re still looking into the feature you brought up. I'll reach out to you as soon as I have an update or if we make any changes that will help!