How iPhone Violates Apple’s Accessibility Guidelines

Apple’s Messages app is a wonderful little piece of technology. As one of the worlds most used messaging apps, it’s remarkably reliable, even with the explosion of features in the past few years. An April 2016 study cited by Business Insider found that US youth between the ages of 10 and 19 average 25 Messages each day, more than Snapchat and Facebook Messenger combined.

For all it’s usage and features, it’s surprising that the core functionality of the app violates a basic accessibility guideline around color contrast. When you send a text to someone, your message floats to the conversation area in a blue or electric green message bubble (depending on whether you’re texting with another iPhone/iPad/Mac user or some other device). While the green and blue offer strong contrast against the grey messages of your conversant and your own, they both fail minimum color contrast for the white text within the bubbles. This color contrast guidance is clearly stated within Apple’s own human interface guidelines, which are based on WCAG’s Accessibility Guidelines.

In layman’s terms: the color of message bubbles makes the text unnecessarily hard to read!

The guidelines state that you should strive for a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 between the text and background colors. Apple’s white text in a blue bubble (iPhone messages) shows a 3.5:1 contrast ratio, while the white text in a green bubble (non-iPhone messages) manages only a 2.1:1 contrast ratio, less than half the recommended minimum contrast!

Apple’s Messages app does not pass their own color contrast guidelines.

Here’s what the Messages app would look like with greens and blues that meet the minimum color contrast ratio recommendation:

If Messages did meet the color contrast guidelines…

The darker shades of blue and green clearly don’t have the sex appeal of the brighter shades currently used in the Messages app … they look a bit drab in comparison. However, it’s clear the darker shades have the edge legibility. This becomes especially important in situations where screen visibility is low, such as in bright sunlight, with low screen brightness settings, or for the visually impaired (8.1 million Americans).

So, to Apple I make this appeal (fruit pun alert): increase the Messages color contrast to meet accessibility guidelines, to make sure everyone can read their messages in any light!