Color, Contrast, and Text Formatting

Visual design choices in a document affect more than appearance — they directly impact whether content is accessible to people with visual disabilities, cognitive differences, and anyone reading in challenging conditions. This page covers color, contrast, font selection, and text formatting practices that support accessibility in Microsoft Office documents and PDFs.

Color and Contrast

Why Contrast Matters

Users with low vision, color blindness, or those reading in poor lighting conditions rely on sufficient contrast between text and its background to read content. When contrast is insufficient, text becomes difficult or impossible to read — not because of the user's ability level, but because of a design choice that could have been avoided.

WCAG 2.1 Level AA defines two contrast requirements under 1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum):

• Normal text (under 18pt, or under 14pt bold): minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 against the background
• Large text (18pt or larger, or 14pt bold or larger): minimum contrast ratio of 3:1 against the background

These ratios apply to text against its direct background — not the page background if there is an intermediate element between them.

Non-Text Contrast

Contrast requirements extend beyond text. 1.4.11 Non-Text Contrast requires a minimum 3:1 contrast ratio for:

• Visual indicators on user interface components — such as the borders of form fields, checkboxes, and radio buttons
• Meaningful graphical elements — such as chart lines, data points, and icons that convey information

If a form field's border is light gray on a white background, users with low vision may not be able to perceive the field at all. If a line chart uses colors with insufficient contrast against the chart background, some data may be invisible to certain users.

Color Is Not Enough

Never use color alone to convey information. 1.4.1 Use of Color applies to all documents regardless of format, and requires that any information conveyed through color is also available through other means.

Common examples of color-only encoding to avoid:

• Marking required form fields in red without any other indicator (such as an asterisk or the word "required")
• Using a red/green color scheme in a chart to indicate pass/fail without labels or patterns
• Indicating a status or category using only background color in a table

Always pair color with a secondary indicator — a label, an icon, a pattern, or text — so the information is available to users who cannot perceive the color difference.

Color Combinations to Avoid

Some color combinations create accessibility problems even when individual contrast ratios appear to meet the minimum. Common problematic combinations include:

• Red and green: The most common form of color blindness (deuteranopia and protanopia) makes red and green difficult to distinguish from each other. Avoid using these colors alone to encode a distinction.
• Blue text on a black background: Even with technically passing contrast, this combination is difficult for many users to read comfortably.
• Light gray on white: Very common in professionally designed documents; frequently fails minimum contrast requirements entirely.
• Yellow on white: Yellow text on a white or light background almost never meets minimum contrast requirements.
• Low-contrast pastels: Pastel color palettes used as backgrounds can cause text contrast failures even with dark text, depending on the specific shade.

When in doubt, test the actual colors rather than assuming a combination is acceptable.

Microsoft Office Contrast Checking

Microsoft Office products flag contrast issues and provide suggested alternatives. If the Accessibility Checker in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint reports a contrast issue, address it in the source document before exporting to PDF.

Adobe Acrobat's built-in accessibility checker does not check color contrast. Contrast must always be verified separately, either in the source application or using external tools.

Testing Contrast

To check contrast, you need the hex color codes (or RGB values) of both the text color and the background color.

Getting hex codes from your document:

If you created the document in Microsoft Office, check the font and fill color pickers — hover over any color swatch to see its name, or click More Colors to find the exact hex or RGB value.

If you are working with an existing PDF, use a color picker tool to sample colors directly from the document:

• Windows: PowerToys Color Picker (Microsoft PowerToys, free) — hover over any pixel to see its hex code
• Mac: Digital Color Meter (built into macOS, under Applications > Utilities)
• Browser: ColorZilla extension (Chrome and Firefox) — samples colors from web pages and on-screen content

Once you have the hex codes, enter them into a contrast checking tool:

• WebAIM Contrast Checker — paste in foreground (most often the text color) and background (the color immediately underneath the foreground content) hex codes to get the contrast ratio and a pass/fail result for both normal and large text thresholds

Fonts and Text

Font Selection

Choose fonts that prioritize readability over style. Use the WVDE-approved font, Fira Sans (available on Google Fonts), as your first choice. If Fira Sans is unavailable, use another sans-serif font such as Arial, Calibri, or Verdana. Sans-serif fonts are generally easier to read on screen than decorative or serif fonts, particularly at smaller sizes. Do not use highly stylized fonts (script, display, or decorative typefaces) for body text.

Avoid using multiple font families in a single document. Consistent typography reduces cognitive load and makes documents easier to scan.

Font Size

Use a minimum font size of 12 points for body text. Smaller text is difficult to read for users with low vision and for anyone reading on a small screen or at a distance.

Footnotes and captions may use a smaller size, but should still be legible — 10 points is typically the practical minimum for secondary text.

Avoid All Caps

Avoid setting body text in all capitals. All-caps text eliminates the variation in letter height and shape that readers — particularly those with dyslexia — rely on to recognize words quickly. Every word becomes a uniform rectangle, which significantly slows reading.

This is a readability concern for all users, not a screen reader issue. Screen readers do not automatically spell out words set in all caps — they read them the same as mixed-case text. The problem is entirely visual and affects every reader, not just those using assistive technology.

All caps is appropriate for true acronyms and initialisms (WVDE, PDF, WCAG), where it conveys that the letters represent individual words. It is not appropriate for headings, labels, emphasis, or any block of text.

Text Alignment

Use left-aligned text for body content. Avoid justified text (aligned to both left and right margins).

Justified text creates uneven spacing between words — sometimes with large gaps, sometimes tightly packed — that varies unpredictably across lines. This irregular spacing is particularly difficult for users with dyslexia, who rely on consistent spacing to track across lines of text. Centered text creates the same problem for blocks of body content longer than a line or two.

Headings may be centered as a deliberate design choice, but body paragraphs should be left-aligned.