When performing eCommerce website designing or crafting an online shop, you might offer much of your thoughts to the design principles and the unusual elements, like the balance of shapes, color harmony, and images and text hierarchy.

But, have you ever considered the color perception, and how it can be received distinctly by distinct people. 

If your site holds problematic contrast issues and color usage, it may easily affect how your customers use your site.

If those issues are severe, they may skip your site and may switch onto your competitors to purchase for their needs.

But, no need to worry at all as there are various points that we should keep track of to avoid such issues and offer our users a user-friendly website experience . 

Moving onto the topic of our post, a survey says that color blindness affects about 7% of the globe’s population.

When it’s about surfing the web, this reduced ability to distinguish certain colors makes it tough to understand the limitless influx of images, videos, and charts. 

First, let’s know about color blindness and its types. 

What Is Colour Blindness?

Rarely, color blindness states that we can’t see any hue at all, or the people who see the things in greyscale.

But, let you know that it’s a decreased caliber of viewing the color, or to differentiate one color from another. 

A type of photoreceptor cell in a human eye, cones are responsible for receiving the color.

There are three sorts of cones and each is responsible for detecting the hues, red, blue, and green wavelengths, in the spectrum.

Issues with color vision emerge when these cells are either absent or defective wholly. Generally, such conditions are inherent problems that we get from our parents since birth.

Moreover, such conditions are also acquired through prolonged exposure to UV light, trauma, a diabetic effect, natural age degeneration, or other factors. 

Types Of Color Blindness

There are two common types of Color Blindness:

• Deuteranopia, and
• Protanopia

These are Gender-linked traits that are much common in males as compared to females. Commonly, deuteranopia occurs in about 7% of men, and 0.5% in women. This is approximately 8% of the whole population and we just can’t ignore this ratio.

Tips Ensuring Color-Accessible & User-friendly Designs 

Let’s now check out the top tips that would make it easy to craft user-friendly and color-accessible designs.

Tip 1: Use Clear Color Names

The color vision deficiencies hurt men substantially more as compared to women.

One room of the web where we should pay extra attention to the color choices and the design decisions is on online shopping sites, especially when you hold a men-clothing selling eStore. 

One fact that annoys people most commonly is the color vision deficiencies that make it tough for people to get the true colors of particular clothing.

This makes them ask someone to finalize a color for them. While it’s simple to shop online as compared to from a physical store, still, some accessibility problems should be incorporated on shopping sites. 

By clearly mentioning the name of the color in the product’s description, we can make it easier for the color-blind users to emerge with a decision for picking their favorite color. 

Tip 2: Use Effective Color Search Filters

Next, one more common issue occurs when we add a color filter to a product search. Various  eCommerce websites also follow some approaches to get the way out of it. They remove the color swatches completely and just use the names instead. 

Another one and the most common technique that is usually picked is color names display on the hover, but you should be sure that this will not work on a touchscreen device where no hovering is allowed. 

The best way includes a blend of both the color swatch samples and perfectly defined labels. 

Tip 3: Avoid Color-Specific Instructions

While designing the forms, a common practice that we should mark mandatory is to input the field in distinct hues.

Or perhaps, if the users attempt to submit with no input in the field, the border of that field should change its color to red, indicating an error.

But, simultaneously, we need to understand that not all users witness the colors similarly. 

So, let’s check out some ways that should be considered to denote mandatory fields in a form:

• Mark the required fields using an asterisk. 
• Or mark those mandatory fields with the “required” label, it would be better.
• If possible, we should remove the optional fields completely. 
• Forms along with alert messages also. Most often, we reveal the success and failure messages using green and red hues respectively. Although, using the prefix text, like “Success” or an icon, will make it easy and quick to be read. 

Tip 4: Avoid Low-Contrast Design

Well, the low-contrast text may be in-trend, but would also be undiscoverable, illegible, and inaccessible to not just the color deficient users, but also for the users with normal vision. Rather, we should include more useful alternatives. 

We should prefer using bold text for appending readability on the low-contrast products and avoid using very thin fonts.

Moreover, we should avoid the CSS and JavaScript techniques that would prevent the users from highlighting the elements on the page via their mouse or alter the default, the highlight nature.

Various visually impaired users use highlighting like a rapid track to enhance the contrast and assist the visual focus. 

Tip 5: Test your Work to Experience Your Designs like a Colorblind User

It’s obvious that if we are not suffering from a color blindness deficiency, it would be hard to imagine its look to the color blinded users.

Well, there are various tools available in the market that simulate distinct sorts of color blindness and it’s best for checking the design to locate any potential error upfront and run its final check before launching. 

Wrapping Up

To ensure that your eCommerce website offers a good user experience to your customers along with a variety of visual deficiencies should not consume much of your project time.

After being more familiar with such guidelines (aforementioned), you will soon start noticing up-front if something would still make a potential issue occur. 

We hope such insights would assist you in using the colors to make your designs more accessible to all.