react-color-a11y

This is a React higher-order component to automatically enforce color accessibility on given components in your application. This is useful when you are rendering colors in your application that you don't have direct control over.

For example, if you are rendering an svg image that comes from an external source, or some colored text, you may not know ahead of time what those colors will be. This becomes even more of a challenge if your application can switch between light and dark mode.

This wrapper allows you to easily ensure that the content in these components is readable, regardless of what colors come into your application. The live demo gives you a good visual of what that could look like.

More information on contrast and accessibility here: https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker

Live Demo

https://bayer-group.github.io/react-color-a11y/

Installation

npm i react-color-a11y

yarn add react-color-a11y

pnpm i react-color-a11y

Usage

import ReactColorA11y from 'react-color-a11y'

const App = () => (
  <ReactColorA11y>
    <div style={{background: '#111', color: '#222'}}>
      <p>This text came from an external source, it may be hard to read... 😢</p>
      <p>Never fear, ReactColorA11y will fix it! 🎉</p>
    </div>
  </ReactColorA11y>
)

export default App

Testing

If you are unit testing your app with jest and jsdom you may see errors because of the lack of standard CSS support there. If you wish to make this wrapper transparent to the tests, you can mock it by placing this line in your jest setup file:

jest.mock('react-color-a11y', () => ({ children }) => children)

We are using Cypress to test the basic functionality of this component, so you should be able to assume that the component works and not test it yourself.

Multiple Children

It is recommended to provide a single child component inside ReactColorA11y. If you provide multiple children, a div will be added around the children so that the color adjustments can be targeted correctly, but this extra element in the DOM could affect your specific styles, so it's preferred to pass only one child.

Options

prop	type	default	description
colorPaletteKey	string	''	If you are switching between light and dark mode for example, you would want to set this to recompute colors for each state.
requiredContrastRatio	number	4.5	This is the contrast Ratio that is required. Depending on the original colors, it may not be able to be reached, but will get as close as possible. https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker
flipBlackAndWhite	bool	false	This is an edge case. Should #000000 be flipped to #ffffff when lightening, or should it only lighten as much as it needs to reach the required contrast ratio? Similarly for the opposite case.
preserveContrastDirectionIfPossible	bool	true	Try to preserve original contrast direction. For example, if the original foreground color is lighter than the background, try to lighten the foreground. If the required contrast ratio can not be met by lightening, then darkening may occur as determined by the luminance threshold.
backgroundColorOverride	string	''	If provided, this color will be used as the effective background color for determining the foreground color. This may be necessary if autodetection of the effective background color is not working, because of absolute positioning, z-index, or other cases where determining this is complex.

ignoreColorA11y data attribute

If you have some elements which you need to ignore in the color corrections for accessibility, you can add the data attribute ignoreColorA11y to those elements. A trivial example would be:

<div style="background: white">
  <svg>
    <rect fill="red"/>
    <rect fill="white" data-ignore-color-a11y=""/>
  </svg>
</div>