What Is Accessible Palette Generator?
Accessible Palette Generator creates color palettes that meet WCAG contrast requirements for text and UI elements. It ensures every color combination in your palette passes AA or AAA accessibility standards, so your designs are usable by people with visual impairments and color vision deficiencies.
How to Use This Tool
Start with a base color or brand color, and the tool generates a full palette of complementary shades — each tagged with its WCAG contrast ratio against light and dark backgrounds. You can adjust individual colors and instantly see whether each pairing passes AA (4.5:1) or AAA (7:1) thresholds. Export the palette as CSS variables, design tokens, or a downloadable image. Everything runs in your browser.
Why Use Accessible Palette Generator?
Manually checking contrast ratios for every color combination in a palette is tedious and error-prone. This tool automates the process, guaranteeing every pairing meets accessibility standards from the start. It’s free, requires no account, and saves hours of compliance checking. For a detailed walkthrough, see our step-by-step guide.
Common Use Cases
Building a brand palette from scratch where the design system needs guaranteed contrast between every text color and its background. Reworking a legacy palette that's accumulated colors over years without an accessibility lens, and needs systematic auditing before a redesign. Producing color variants for state (hover, active, disabled, error, success) that all clear the same contrast bar.
Designing for dark mode and light mode together, where each accent color needs a valid pair against both backgrounds. Creating semantic-color ramps (success, warning, error, info) where the deepest tone needs to be readable as button text and the lightest as a background fill. Validating a color recommended by a marketing team meets the legal accessibility bar before it ships.
How We Compare
Coolors, Adobe Color, and Khroma offer beautiful palettes but optimize for aesthetic harmony first and accessibility second — you typically have to manually check each color pairing afterwards. Stark and Contrast for Mac do contrast checking well but are checkers, not generators. The Material Design color tool is excellent for building tonal palettes that clear AA, but it's constrained to Material's aesthetic.
This generator inverts the usual order: contrast requirement first, palette second. You set the contrast bar (typically WCAG AA 4.5:1 for body text), pick anchor colors, and the tool only proposes shades that pass against the chosen background. Color-blindness simulation is built in so you can preview each palette through deuteranopia, protanopia, and tritanopia. For per-pairing verification afterwards, pair it with WCAG compliance checker.
A useful follow-on workflow: once the palette passes contrast checks, run a color-blindness simulation against your actual interface mocks (not just the swatches). Many palettes that clear the math fall short in real layout because nearby colors collide visually for users with deuteranopia or protanopia.
Frequently Asked Questions
Built by Derek Giordano · Part of Ultimate Design Tools