Accessible color scheme picker

[kestrell]

I went back into my livejournal archives to find this, because I remembered how addictive *and* accessible this color scheme picker was.

You can pick different motifs –city sidewalks would be great for an urban-based website, for instance—or you can pick schemes such as “green trees,” which I include a link to after the main url.

Instant Color Schemes
http://www.gpeters.com/color/color-schemes.php

green trees

https://gpeters.com/color/color-schemes.php?search_term=green%20trees

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

That IS a cool tool, although it does cough up some low-contrast options. I tried putting your green-trees link in the WebAIM checker and it spit out tons of "Tabular Layout! Bad site no biscuit."

[elusiveat]

I like this on principle, but each scheme includes a lot of different hues of an assortment of shades to pick from, some of which are very similar ot each other. My understanding is that there is a common design recommendation to stick with just three or four main colors with maybe a few other colors for accents. That seems like it would be a challenge when you can't see color to decide which combination of shades would work best for your layout.

A website like Coolors (https://coolors.co) gives just a handful of colors, with the option of getting a dark-to-light gradient for each one. Which seems like useful information, but they've also got a highly interactive interface with lots of mouse-over functionality and similar, so I'm guessing it's kind of crappy from an interface accessibility standpoint. If I'm wrong in this guess, please let me know!

I wonder if anyone knows of sites that combine high accessibility with a relatively simple set of colors to pick from.

One thing that's nice about Coolors is that it gives the option of uploading a photograph and creating a color scheme from the photo. So in principle you could use one of your kestrel photos to automatically generate a color scheme. But that depends on the interface actually being workable.

[kestrell]

Yes, I looked at this site, among others, this morning while checking to find out if there was a color scheme picker that was any better than the one I posted, but this site is crap for accessibility. It doesn't even have many of the links labelled.

When I post a resource, I realize that it isn't the best overall resource for everyone, but the best overall that is accessible, which is often a very small pool from which to select. The smaller selection of repeated colors doesn't bother me, because only about 215 colors are web-safe for usability anyway.