Level A · WCAG 2.0
1.4.1 Use of Color
Colour alone cannot carry information, mark a state, or tell the user to do something.
Partly automated Some failures are detectable, others need judgement.
How it fails in practice
Links inside a paragraph shown only by being blue. A status column where green means shipped and red means failed, with no other difference.
How to fix it
Add a second signal: an underline, an icon, a word. The colour stays — it just stops being load-bearing.
At a glance
- Level
- Level A — the minimum. Failing one of these usually makes something impossible rather than merely hard.
- Principle
- Perceivable
- Guideline
- 1.4 Distinguishable
- Added in
- WCAG 2.0
- EN 301 549
- 9.1.4.1
- Automated check
- Partly automated
Partly automated
How far an automated check gets
A tool finds some failures here and cannot see the rest. A clean automated result means the checks that exist found nothing — not that the criterion is met. This is the gap that makes a green scan look like an accessible site, and it is where the keyboard agent, the agents still in development and a human reviewer do the remaining work.
Rules that check this criterion
link-in-text-blockLink distinguished by colour only
The rule ids are axe-core’s (version 4.14.0), the open-source engine our scan runs, and our keyboard agent’s — the names a report or a CI log will show. An underlined id has a page of its own here.
Where it matters most
The guides that list it among the criteria to check first.
Related criteria
Other criteria under the same guideline.
Further reading
-
Contrast checker
Free color contrast checker: test text (1.4.3), icons and controls (1.4.11) and links against WCAG 2.2 – and get the nearest colour that passes.
-
link-in-text-block
The axe rule link-in-text-block flags links in text that differ only by colour, below 3:1. Underline them – with code example and a manual test.
Find out which criteria your site fails
We scan up to 100 pages against WCAG 2.2 AA, send the keyboard agent through the page you name and email you the report — free, once, no strings.