YIQ Color Contrast
A naive approach to determing whether a color is "light" or "dark" by checking the lightness value in the HSL color space. It works sometimes, but often produces color pairings that - while technically correct - just look a little "off". The reason for this is that the eye is more sensitive to changes in the orange-blue range than in the purple-green range, so the percieved lightness of a color can change depending its wavelength.The YIQ color space is designed to take this bias into account. It weighs the different parts of the color according to their impact on our perpection of the color's brightness. By utilizing this color space when doing contrast comparison, the result is a color pairing that appears more natural.
For information on color contrast and the YIQ color space:
- 24 Ways: Calculating Color Contrast
- W3C: Ensure that foreground and background color combinations provide sufficient contrast when viewed by someone having color deficits or when viewed on a black and white screen
- Wikipedia: YIQ
Installation options
NPM
``` npm install sass-yiq ```Bower
``` bower install sass-yiq ```Usage
```scss @import 'yiq-color-contrast' ```Configurable Variables
All configuration variables are assigned with the!default
flag, so they may be overriden in your project stylesheet.```scss $yiq-contrasted-dark-default: #000; ```
The text color to be used when a background is determined to be "light"
```scss $yiq-contrasted-light-default: #fff; ```
The text color to be used when a background is determined to be "dark"
```scss $yiq-contrasted-threshold: 128; ```
A a value between 0 and 255. It determines when the lightness of color changes from "dark" to "light".
```scss $yiq-debug: false; ```
Toggles diagnostic messages.
Functions
```scss yiq-is-light($color, $threshold) ```Returns
true
if the color is "light" or false
if it is "dark".```scss yiq-contrast-color($color, $dark, $light, $threshold) ```
Returns the
$light
color when the $color
is dark and the $dark
color when the $color
is light. The $threshold
is a value between 0 and 255 and it determines when the lightness of $color
changes from "dark" to "light".Mixins
```scss @include yiq-contrasted($background-color, $dark, $light, $threshold) ```Sets the specified background color and calculates a dark or light contrasted text color. The arguments are passed through to the
yiq-contrast-color function
.