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There are a number of different use cases & requirements for "please give me a color that contrasts with this/these other color(s)" functions, but given the differences between these use cases, perhaps they'd best be addressed with additional color functions.
"Given this color, please compute a different color for me that contrasts with it." Variations of this include distinguishing between "this is intended for foreground text v. a background under text" and some threshold of sufficient contrast (WCAG, for instance, has 3 different thresholds for different situations).
"Given a color and a set of colors, tell me which color from that set maximally contrasts" (same fore/background and threshold variations as in (1), but the key difference here is that the author provides a set of colors and there's a guarantee that the returned color will be from that set)
"Given a pair of colors, tweak one or both of them the minimum amount to get the contrast 'good enough'" (same fore/background and threshold variations)
Contrasting color over an unknown background (e.g. an image)
Two relevant personas:
Maintainer of existing, small/medium (not Google-scale) website(s) who want to improve legibility/a11y without messing with the existing design much
Designer at company with very particular and exact brand guidelines who can only use colors from a pre-defined set
Just the obligatory comment that WCAG2 contrast is not perceptually uniform (and it's not even close), is not supported by modern color or vision science, and is substantially wrong enough that using it in any automated function will have unpredictable/inaccessible results.
Worse, if designers get to the habit of setting contrast "by the numbers" (using the numbers of WCAG2), poor readability is the most likely result. This is especially true for dark modes, where WCAG2 fails most.
There are a number of different use cases & requirements for "please give me a color that contrasts with this/these other color(s)" functions, but given the differences between these use cases, perhaps they'd best be addressed with additional color functions.
Two relevant personas:
@cookiecrook @fantasai
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