What is Color Gradient?
A color gradient is a smooth transition between two or more colors, where the change happens gradually rather than abruptly. Instead of sharp boundaries, colors blend step by step across a surface or space. Color gradients are important because they help create visual depth, guide the viewer’s attention, and make designs feel more natural and appealing. By using gradual color changes, gradients improve clarity, aesthetics, and user experience while avoiding visual harshness.
How to Check Gradients?
To ensure that color contrast meets accessibility standards and provides sufficient readability, verify that contrast ratios exceed 4.5:1, especially for body text and key interface elements. Maintaining this level of contrast enhances usability and ensures compliance with recognized accessibility guidelines.
In situations where the color is a gradient or cannot be determined programmatically, compare the lightest part of the text with the lightest part of the background using the color picker. Then compare the darkest part of the text with the darkest part of the background.
Choose a color picker tool and a color contrast checker tool.
Note: Some color contrast checkers like WebAIM’s Color Contrast Checker and TPGi’s Color Contrast Analyzer have a color picker built into their checker tool. For this article, we will use WebAIM color contrast tool.
- Click inside the input field filled with the color (next to the Hex value field).
- When the color menu opens, look for the Color picker icon (a dropper tool).
- This is what you’ll use to select the colors from your gradient and text.
- In the web page or image, use the color picker to select the lightest part of the text color and the lightest part of the gradient’s background color.
- In the Color Contrast Checker, enter the text colors into the “foreground” and “background” inputs. Results will show up automatically below.
- Based on the results of these two checks, you can adjust either your gradient colour or your text colour and recheck to achieve a passing overall contrast score.
