In Android 14, Android’s dynamic color engine (“monet”) seems to be adding better support for users who enable “high contrast” to improve visibility! Apps should look good for everyone, including those who rely on Android’s accessibility features!
In Android 14, the system generates a new FRRO (Fabricated Runtime Resource Overlay) called “dynamic” that overlays several new R.color fields. You can see the mapping in the below screenshot. The full list of new R.color fields can be seen here.
We wasn’t sure what these new tokens were really for until we spotted this recent commit to the Material Components library: “[Tokens/Color] Added U color resources for contrast mode support.”
What’s happening is Android is generating an FRRO with new Material You tonal palettes that take into account if the user has high contrast mode enabled. Monet already accounts for contrast issues when generating palettes, but high contrast presents additional challenges.
The Material Components library will probably handle juggling the various R.color resources to use based on whether high contrast is enabled, so most app developers probably won’t have to worry about anything (unless you were directly using R.color values instead of tokens).
(Sidenote: It’s not clear if “contrast” is specifically related to “high contrast text” in Settings. There could be some new contrast settings added to the ThemePicker [Wallpaper & styles on Pixels]. We’ll have to wait and see.)
As usual, since Google hasn’t made a formal announcement on this change yet, there’s no guarantee it’ll ship in the stable Android 14 release.