Editorial Standards
ScanHue publishes color tools and the guides that explain them. Both are made by the same small independent team, which means the person writing about a contrast threshold is the person who implemented the contrast calculation. This page documents how that work is done, so you can judge the guides rather than trust them.
Who writes these guides
Articles are written and edited in-house by the ScanHue editorial team and published under the site's name rather than an invented personal byline. We do not accept guest posts, sponsored articles, or paid link placements, and no article on this site has been commissioned or reviewed by an advertiser. If that ever changes, the article will say so at the top.
Every number is computed, not estimated
Color writing is full of numbers that get copied from one blog to the next until nobody can say where they came from. Our rule is simple: if a guide states a value, we produced that value with the same tools published on this site, and you can reproduce it in your browser.
- Contrast ratios use the WCAG relative luminance formula (the 0.2126 / 0.7152 / 0.0722 coefficients on linearized sRGB channels), the same code that runs in the Contrast Checker. Reported verdicts follow the published thresholds: 4.5:1 for normal text at AA, 3:1 for large text and meaningful non-text elements, 7:1 for normal text at AAA.
- Extracted palettes come from the median-cut quantization used by the Photo Palette Extractor, run on the actual image referenced in the article. When we describe a film frame or a photograph, the swatches are the extractor's output for that frame, not a designer's impression of it.
- Color vision simulations apply the Machado, Oliveira and Fernandes (2009) severity matrices in linear RGB, as implemented in the Colorblind Simulator.
- Format conversions — HEX, RGB, HSL, CMYK, OKLCH — are produced by the Color Code Converter, and scale steps by the Shades & Tints Generator, so the values in an article and the values you get from the tool cannot drift apart.
What we follow, and where we stop
Accessibility guidance follows the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Color space behavior follows the CSS Color specifications. Color vision deficiency simulation follows the peer-reviewed model cited above. Where a topic is genuinely contested — color psychology is the clearest example — we say that the evidence is weak instead of presenting cultural association as fact.
We also state the limits of the tools. Automatic extraction reports what is in the pixels of one image, which is not the same as an official brand palette or a film's color script; a contrast ratio certifies a numeric relationship, not legibility at every size; and a simulation approximates one model of color vision rather than any individual's experience.
Privacy is part of the method
Every tool runs entirely in your browser. Images are never uploaded, and there is no account system, so the examples in our guides were produced exactly the way yours will be — locally, on the same code you are running. Details are in the Privacy Policy.
Updates and corrections
Guides are revised when a specification changes, when a tool's behavior changes, or when a reader shows us we are wrong. Substantive revisions update the article's modified date, which is shown in the byline and published in the page's structured data. We correct errors in place rather than quietly deleting them, and a correction that changes a recommendation is noted in the text.
Found a mistake, a stale threshold, or a value you cannot reproduce? Email contact@scanhue.com with the article and the number you disagree with. Reproducible corrections are the fastest kind to make.
How the site is funded
ScanHue is free to use, has no accounts, and no paid tier. It is funded by advertising. Advertising has no influence on which topics we cover, what a guide concludes, or which tools we recommend — and we only ever recommend our own tools where they actually do the job being described.
Start reading
The full library is in Guides & Articles, grouped from fundamentals to applied practice. If you want the tools first, begin with the Photo Palette Extractor and the Contrast Checker.