A Primer on Color Contrast: The Business Case for Accessible Marketing

Curious about accessible marketing? Take a look at a selection of slides from my presentation at Digital Summit, or keep reading below for the context and background on this topic—one I’m deeply passionate about. Digital Summit is a virtual conference that convenes industry professionals, thought leaders, and experts to explore emerging trends and best practices in digital marketing and technology.

For centuries, color was treated as secondary—an aesthetic flourish rather than a fundamental tool of communication. “A certain distaste for color runs through Western culture like a ladder in a stocking,” observes cultural historian Kassia St. Clair in her book, The Secret Lives of Color. Shades, dyes and hues were “a distraction from the true glories of art: line and form.”

Today, however, the Western world is built on color. Brands rely on it as a visual shorthand for recognition and differentiation. The world’s most successful soft drink is known by its signature red; the most famous fast-food chain is synonymous with its Golden Arches. We have blossomed into a chromophilic culture—which, of course, influences marketing.

With only seconds to capture attention, marketers use color to impact people’s decision-making. The University of Southern California asserts that “color alone contributes up to 90 percent of the information that forms the [purchasing] decision.”

What does this mean, however, for the millions of people who live with some form of color vision deficiency (also known as color blindness)? If color has moved to the center of consumer behavior and brand identity, then how much of the message is miscommunicated, or even lost entirely, when it is shared with people who perceive color differently from the presumed visual baseline? The challenge is not niche: 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women are affected by color blindness.

This is the point at the heart of accessible marketing. Marketers and their organizations intentionally and savvily wield color to persuade people—to guide them, engage with them, and even evoke particular feelings. It therefore only makes sense for digital creators to work hard to ensure their campaigns can not only been seen by but also understood by as many people as possible. In other words, to maximize impact, aesthetics must be blended with accessibility.

Lessons from the Physical World

First, though, let’s take a broader view. The importance of accessibility, which is sometimes abbreviated “a11y” (because its first letter is a, its last letter is y, and there are 11 letters in between) extends beyond the digital landscape—it is in fact already embedded in the physical world around us.

Consider the tactile paving on subway platforms, which signals proximity to the dangerous edge; or the auditory cues that accompany crosswalk signals. These are deliberate design choices that prioritize inclusivity. Digital spaces, too, need this level of intentional reach maximization. And as creators in digital spaces, marketers have an opportunity and responsibility to act with this intent and curate experiences and messages that support all users.

One well-known, if under-discussed, example of such thoughtfulness is the enduring presence of default hyperlink blue in digital spaces. This color, which has been a website staple for over 30 years (and can almost certainly be visualized by anyone who ‘surfed the web’ in the days of GeoCities and Angelfire), persists and was first deployed for the self-same reason: when paired with white, the most common background color, an exceptionally high accessibility rating is achieved. (Yes—as we’ll explore shortly, accessibility can be rated!) The contrast of that blue on plain white remains undefeated, even as our standards for accessibility have elevated in the decades since.

The scope of considerations is vast. It encompasses everything from the size of call-to-action buttons to the inclusion of alt text for images. (The former is a concern for accommodating users who might have limited dexterity; the latter, for ensuring that accessible devices like screen readers can convey key information.) As noted by authors Steven Heller and Véronique Vienne in their book Citizen Designer (p. 143), there is almost no limit the number of things that a considerate marketer or digital creator can think about on behalf of their users:

What is the person’s knowledge, education, or skill level: beginner, intermediate, or advanced? Are they young, middle aged, or elderly? Do they have any impairments: dyslexia, visual clarity, cognitive, memory, dexterity, mobility, autism, or color blindness? What is their literacy level: low, medium, or high, and how will that affect their ability to process the content?

Do they use or require assistive aids, technology, or devices: glasses, magnifier, hearing aid, walking stick, wheelchair, screen reader, reinterpretation software, dictation/audio software, or refreshable braille? What technology do they use: paper, desktop computer, laptop, tablet, smartphone, or smart watch? How about the environment they are in: lighting (good or bad), weather (sunny, windy, rainy, old, hot), noise?

Color Contrast in Email Marketing

Given the breadth of this topic (as well as time constraints), I chose to focus my Digital Summit presentation on color contrast in email marketing. Why? Because email remains one of our most powerful conversion channels, and it sits squarely in my wheelhouse as a certified marketing automation specialist. Plus, in a chromophilic culture like ours, where color is massively important in communication, not thinking about accessibility can lead to pretty negative outcomes. It risks a disconnect with millions of people.

During the session, I guided fellow practitioners through a framework that would help them elevate the accessibility in their marketing across three dimensions:

1. Visual clarity: Ensuring content remains legible and navigable for all users
   

2. Color contrast: Implementing evidence-based design practices that support diverse visual abilities
   

3. Technological adaptability: Building emails that perform consistently across devices and assistive technologies

Measuring Accessibility: From Guidelines to Practice

Also I outlined the key principles of inclusive design, including the importance of:

• Understanding AA and AAA content ratings as defined by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)

  • Reviewing WCAG 2.2 success criteria to identify minimum requirements for email content

  • Determining which level (AA or AAA) aligns with a brand’s accessibility commitment and target audience needs

  • Integrating WCAG requirements into creative briefs and design guidelines

• Calculating and interpreting contrast ratios, one of the most critical quantitative measures of accessibility

  • Auditing a brand’s color palette using free online tools to validate text legibility, e.g., WebAIM’s Contrast Checker (which analyzes specific color combinations by hexadecimal code), PowerMapper (which analyzes a whole website), and AudioEye (which can do both)

  • Establishing minimum contrast ratios of 4.5:1 for normal-size text and 3:1 for large text (the AA standard)

  • Creating alternate options for brand color combinations that fall below requirements

• Conducting comprehensive audits of campaigns to identify and address accessibility gaps

  • Testing email templates across multiple screen readers and assistive technologies

  • Implementing a ‘pre-flight’ checklist for all campaigns wherein campaign owners within the marketing organization (as well as functionally) can confirm alt text, semantic HTML, and keyboard navigation

  • Establishing quarterly accessibility reviews of the highest-performing email templates to continually improve standards (which, hopefully, can be housed straightforwardly within broader design reviews)

This approach equipped attendees with actionable strategies to conduct measurable audits of their marketing assets, particularly email campaigns, while articulating the business value of inclusive design to cross-functional stakeholders.

Empathy As Expertise

Undeniably, the business case for accessible marketing is strong. To ignore the billions of people who might benefit from it is to overlook a huge portion of the total addressable market: a financial misstep. But in cases like this, I think it’s also important to remember our hierarchy of identity, which I ground in a theory developed by sociologist Sheldon Stryker called “identity salience.” It holds, in a nutshell, that we all have multiple identities at once, but most important is the one that we’re likeliest to tap into or call upon across multiple situations in our lives: at work, at home or anywhere in between. When it comes to being a digital creator and communicator, I therefore like to remind my teams and my audiences that we are human beings first and marketers second—just as everyone in our user base is first a human being and then a potential source of new revenue.

I don’t think this is a foreign or even all that difficult concept for us professional marketers. As humans, we’re all wired for empathy. And, it’s generally observable and accepted that we consistently produce better outcomes for ourselves and each other when we operate from this foundation. (As IDEO defines it, empathy is “the capacity to step into other people’s shoes, to understand their lives, and start to solve problems from their perspectives.”) Through this lens, empathetic marketing is better marketing; and since accessibility is an empathetic concern, accessible marketing is better marketing.

Consider the cognitive burden placed on someone who might have an impairment and who is trying to engage with marketing materials or a campaign that was not designed with their needs in mind (or even vaguely in consideration). “What is this ad trying to tell me? What context am I missing?” Clarity is always our goal, so if someone is asking themselves questions like this—trying hard to “feel the right feeling” as another sociologist, Arlie Hochschild, put it when he defined emotional labor—we’ve not done our job as marketers. The job is to make a message that works not for us, but for the recipients.

“We must remain attuned to the diverse abilities and evolving needs of our audiences,” Heller and Vienne state in Citizen Designer. “Demographics often change. People rarely stay the same.”