Spent $300 on a fancy color contrast checker and I'm not sold

I bought this software that promised to analyze my designs for color contrast issues and give me a full report. It cost about $300 for the license. Everyone in my circle was talking about how you need a tool like this to be serious about accessibility. But honestly, after using it for a few months, I feel like it made me lazy. I'd just run the scan, get a pass/fail, and move on without really thinking about why something failed or if the 'pass' was actually good in real use. I caught myself ignoring edge cases because the tool said it was fine. I think you learn more by manually checking with a few free browser extensions and, more importantly, by asking actual people to test things. Has anyone else found that relying too much on automated tools can backfire?

3 comments

3 Comments

gavin_burns492mo ago

Oh man, my buddy had the same thing happen! He bought a similar tool and it totally killed his instinct for good design.

finleybutler2mo ago

Yeah, my friend's design work got super generic after he started using one of those tools too.

keith_henderson7d ago

My buddy Mike from coding bootcamp bought one of those AI design tools a few months back. He showed me his first few projects and they looked fine but after a couple weeks everything he made started feeling the same, like it was all cut from one template. He told me last week he actually uninstalled it because he realized he was just letting the tool make all the choices for him. Now he's going back to sketching things out on paper first to get his eye back.