HP Forums

Full Version: maximizing keyboard label contrast
You're currently viewing a stripped down version of our content. View the full version with proper formatting.

Not long ago someone posted in a thread that they had done work developing an algorithm to evaluate the contrast of labels on various HP keyboards over the years. Any information on this topic would be greatly appreciated!

Best Regards,
HDE

Well, I don't know if I'd call it an algorithm.

But, what I did at HHC2004 was to measure the color of the background and the color of the function on the background using the built-in windows paint program, which gave the color a score on RGB of 0-255 for each color.

I then did a variation of the distance between two points by :

SquareRoot of ( (R1 - R2)^2 + (G1 - G2)^2 + (B1-B2)^2 )

which gives a score of 0 (for the same color) up to about 440 for black and white.

Scores above 200 seem to provide good contrast when shown to people.

There is a link somewhere to my powerpoint presentation from HHC2004, but I dont' have it handy. It would either be at the HHC2004 website or on Jake Schwartz' site.

Exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!

You might find our colour selector tool useful; it lets you wander around the space of available colours along a number of dimensions, lets you see text in relation to the colour, and lets you generate sets of colours that are maximally distinct in various ways.

It also has links to various other resources, including one on choosing colour schemes that work for colour-blind people.

Just something more to include in your analysis, from the old black-and-white TV days: There is a magnitude called "luminance", usually denoted by the "Y" letter. The luminance has to do with the graytone brightness of a given color, and with the different sensibility of the human eye to different colors. The formula

Y = 0.59 x G + 0.30 x R + 0.11 x B

gives the luminance value for a color specified by RGB values. When choosing different colors in the color space, you may also want to make them different in the luminance value; so they will be different (brighter-darker) even from a grayscale standpoint.