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This guideline is a part of the English Wikipedia's Manual of Style. Editors should follow it, except where common sense and the occasional exception will improve an article. Before editing this page, please make sure that your revision reflects consensus. |
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This page in a nutshell: Be careful when adding colours to articles. |
Colours are most commonly found in Wikipedia articles within templates and tables.
To use a colour in a template or table you can use the hex triplet (e.g. bronze is #CD7F32) or HTML colour names (e.g. red).
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Using colours in articles
The following guidance aims to improve accessibility in articles (see Wikipedia:Accessibility) as well as ensure that articles look as good as possible:
- Ensure that colour is not the only way used to convey important information. Especially, do not use coloured text unless its status is also indicated using another method such as italic emphasis or footnote labels. Otherwise, blind users or readers accessing Wikipedia through a printout or device without a colour screen will not receive that information.
- Many readers of Wikipedia may be partially or fully colour blind. Ensure that the colour combinations used in Wikipedia (infoboxes, navigational boxes, graphs, etc.) have an adequate contrast. Use a colour scheme generator to select the colours, and tools for simulating colour blind vision (colorfilter.wickline.org or vischeck.com) to check the result.
- Overriding a link colour, especially to red, is confusing and should be avoided.
- Be aware of the contrast of both plain text and the blue link text with the background colour and avoid clashes where possible (such as blue writing on a red background).
- Web pages can be checked on-line by the developers with AccessColor, which analyses the HTML source for a web page and the Cascading Style Sheets associated, and then calculates the colour contrast and colour brightness between the text and background colours to check that they conform with WCAG 1.0.
- Suitable colour contrast for people with vision impairments, including colour blindness, can be tested with the Colour Contrast Analyser or a specific Firefox extension that use the draft algorithms from the W3C.
Overriding font colour
To make a word have colour, use: <span style="color:hex triplet or colour name">text</span>
Examples:
<span style="color:red">red writing</span>shows as red writing<span style="color:#0f0">green writing</span>shows as green writing<span style="color:#0000f1">blue writing</span>shows as blue writing
Wikimedia colour schemes
Wikipedia
Wikipedia uses this colour scheme on its Main Page.
- Please note that the colour for the border on the lighter boxes is also the colour of the backgrounds of the darker (title) boxes.
| background:#f5fffa border:#cef2e0 | background:#cef2e0 border:#a3bfb1 | ||
| background:#f5faff border:#cedff2 | background:#cedff2 border:#a3b0bf | ||
| background:#faf5ff border:#ddcef2 | background:#ddcef2 border:#afa3bf | ||
| background:#fcfcfc border:#cccccc |
And additionally on the Community Portal and Wikisource Main Page:
| background:#fffaf5 border:#f2e0ce | background:#f2e0ce border:#bfb1a3 |
Additional 3-colour palettes using this same generation scheme are at the top of the talk page. The background colour of Wikipedia pages is #F8FCFF.
Commons
The Wikimedia Commons uses this colour scheme on commons:Main Page and commons:Help:Contents.
|
background colour: #d0e5f5
background colour: #f1f5fc |
background colour: #faecc8
background colour: #faf6ed |
See also
- Web colors
- List of colors
- Wikipedia:Accessibility
- Wikipedia:WikiProject Color
- Wikipedia:Template standardisation
- Template:Fontcolor and template:Colorsample
- Color tool - list of online color tools
- Wikipedia:Infobox colours - inactive
- Wikipedia:WikiProject Usability/Color - inactive
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 5 September 2008, at 00:13.
Wikipedia Authorship and Review
Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by MedLibrary.org. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with MedLibrary.org.
Wikipedia Usage Guidelines
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "Wikipedia:Colours".
The URL for this specific entry is:
All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.