Last Updated on: Saturday, January 17, 2009 2:41 PM

Distinguishable

This is guideline 1.4 from w3.org. This guideline covers the use of color to convey information, to prompt action or some sort of interactivity. It also talks of audio control, and recommends that if a sound clip is longer than 3 seconds that it have a mechanism available to pause or stop the audio. Personally, I’ve never been a fan of audio starting automatically on webpages. Many designers understand that importance of audio in webpages but color schemes are much often lost to the design side of the site. Making content easier by using colors that contrast with the background instead of blend in, or making links a different color than text helps users distinguish the different types of content of the site.

You can also use color to convey certain things to the user, such as you can use red text for errors or blue for links. While red and blue might not exactly fit into the color scheme it will help users pick out certain content. Using colors in navigation by using the hover and visited colors you can help users understand where the links are going to take them and where they are.

The section also instructed on using text in images and recommended that it only be used for decoration only. Users have the option to turn off images and putting regular content of your page in an image would not allow everyone to view your content.