2. Agenda
• About me
• The problems we’re trying to solve
• Looking for inspiration
• Our solution
3. About Me
• User Experience Manager at CollegeSource
• Responsible for:
• User interface design
• Product Testing
• Product documentation
• Accessibility
4. About CollegeSource
• Higher Education software company
• Transfer Credit, Degree Audit and Degree Planning and Scheduling
• Clients throughout the United States, Canada and Hong Kong
5. The Problems
• Our clients theme or re-skin our web applications to match their
school colors/branding guidelines
6. The Problems
• Previously done by editing CSS files
• Requires IT involvement
• Assumes knowledge of CSS
7. The Problems
• When clients theme our applications, they could potentially break contrast
accessibility
10. Looking for inspiration
• Seems to be some sort of
threshold
• If you select a color that’s too
light, it doesn’t save it
• No indication why you aren’t
able to save it
16. Looking for inspiration
• Atlassian’s Confluence
• Collaborative documentation tool
• Can set custom themes for the
entire application or via individual
space
17. Looking for inspiration
• Atlassian’s Confluence
• Can set text and background
colors, but no warning if in
combination do not have good
contrast
19. Looking for inspiration
• WebAIM Color Contrast Checker
• Set foreground and background
color
• Displays:
• Contrast Ratio
• An example
• If those colors pass WCAG AA and
AAA
• Allows you to adjust the
lightness/darkness
22. How to use these colors?
• Color values (hex values) are saved in the database
• We wanted to load colors via CSS rather than javascript
23. How to use these colors?
• Use LESS to generate the CSS files
• LESS is a CSS preprocessor
• Allows you to use variables, operations, and functions
24. How to use these colors?
• User is setting LESS variables
• Used to generate hover, active and disabled styling
26. Our Theming Tool
• The theming tool within the
uAchieve applications
• A user with administrator access
sets the colors for two themes,
“Default” and “High Contrast”
27. Our Theming Tool
• We tell them if the contrast ratio
between the text and
background of elements is
WCAG compliant
28. Our Theming Tool
• Contrast checks for:
• Two menus
• 7 buttons
• Charts & Graphs
• Two overall themes:
• Default
• High Contrast
29. Our Theming Tool
• Opted not to add a color picker at this time
• Colleges and Universities have set color schemes they must use
32. Our Theming Tool
• On the default theme, users can
save non-compliant colors
• On the high contrast theme,
they cannot. All color selections
must pass at least WCAG AA
33. Parting Thoughts
What are other ways we as designers and
developers can include accessibility tools within
our applications?