Interactive element contrast sufficient

foundational

Normative Text

Visual information required to identify interactive elements and states meet a minimum contrast ratio test

Except when

the interactive element is inactive, or
when the appearance of the component is determined by the user agent and not modified by the content author.

Tests

This section is non-normative.

Procedure

For each interactive element:

Identify which visual information defines the boundaries of the interactive area.
Check if the visual information meets the minimum contrast ratio test.
For each possible state, repeat step 1 and 2.

Expected results

#2 and #3 are true.

Tests

This content needs to be written.

Key Terms

accessibility support set

group of user agents and assistive technologies you test with

The AGWG is considering defining a default set of user agents and assistive technologies that they use when validating guidelines.

Accessibility support sets may vary based on language, region, or situation.

If you are not using the default accessibility set, the conformance report should indicate what set is being used.

accessibility supported

available and working in the user agents and assistive technology in the accessibility support set

The working group intended to include a default accessibility support set. See Default accessibility support set #277.

assistive technology

hardware and/or software that acts as a user agent, or along with a mainstream user agent, to provide functionality to meet the requirements of users with disabilities that go beyond those offered by mainstream user agents

Functionality provided by assistive technology includes alternative presentations (e.g., as synthesized speech or magnified content), alternative input methods (e.g., voice), additional navigation or orientation mechanisms, and content transformations (e.g., to make tables more accessible).

Assistive technologies often communicate data and messages with mainstream user agents by using and monitoring APIs.

The distinction between mainstream user agents and assistive technologies is not absolute. Many mainstream user agents provide some features to assist individuals with disabilities. The basic difference is that mainstream user agents target broad and diverse audiences that usually include people with and without disabilities. Assistive technologies target narrowly defined populations of users with specific disabilities. The assistance provided by an assistive technology is more specific and appropriate to the needs of its target users. The mainstream user agent may provide important functionality to assistive technologies like retrieving web content from program objects or parsing markup into identifiable bundles.

Assistive technologies that are important in the context of this document include the following:

screen magnifiers, and other visual reading assistants, which are used by people with visual, perceptual and physical print disabilities to change text font, size, spacing, color, synchronization with speech, etc. in order to improve the visual readability of rendered text and images;
screen readers, which are used by people who are blind to read textual information through synthesized speech or braille;
text-to-speech software, which is used by some people with cognitive, language, and learning disabilities to convert text into synthetic speech;
speech recognition software, which may be used by people who have some physical disabilities;
alternative keyboards, which are used by people with certain physical disabilities to simulate the keyboard (including alternate keyboards that use head pointers, single switches, sip/puff and other special input devices.);
alternative pointing devices, which are used by people with certain physical disabilities to simulate mouse pointing and button activations.

contrast ratio test

meeting a sufficient level of contrast between two colors using the relationship of hue, saturation, and lightness values

The contrast algorithm used in WCAG 3 is yet to be determined.

interactive element

element that responds to user input and has a distinct programmatically determinable name

In contrast to non-interactive elements. For example, headings or paragraphs.

non-interactive element

element that does not respond to user input and does not include sub-parts

If a paragraph included a link, the text either side of the link would be considered a static element, but not the paragraph as a whole.

Letters within text do not constitute a “smaller part”.

programmatically determinable

meaning of the content and all its important attributes can be determined by software functionality that is accessibility supported

user agent

any software that retrieves and presents web content for users