Image colour picker

Why every pick shows a contrast verdict

A colour lifted from a photo is often headed straight into a design — a background, a text colour, a button. Whether that colour is usable for text depends on what sits behind or in front of it, and that is exactly what WCAG 1.4.3 measures: the contrast ratio between two colours, computed from their relative luminance. We compute that ratio against pure white and pure black — the same WCAG 2.2 formula our own scanner uses — so a “Pass” here means the same thing it would in a full page audit.

Picked a colour you want to pair with something other than plain black or white? Every result links straight into the full contrast checker, with your picked colour already filled in.

How it works — and why it never leaves your device

The picker decodes your image into an HTML canvas element and reads pixel values with the browser’s own getImageData API — there is no upload step, no server involved, and nothing is sent anywhere. Large images are scaled down before any pixel is read, so even a big photo stays fast. That also means privacy is not a policy promise here; it is a direct consequence of how the tool is built.

One colour is a start. Your whole site is more.

Picking a colour from an image and checking its contrast is one small, useful step. Point our free scanner at a real URL and it checks the whole page against WCAG 2.2 — contrast included — and tells you what to fix first, with the legal context for the site’s jurisdiction.

Want the full pass/fail matrix for one colour pair? Try the contrast checker, or see what our scanner covers, criterion by criterion.