Even though Android 14 DP2 has been available for a few weeks, our team is still finding new features within. The most recent is a new method for making things easier to see and read by adding more contrast to your Material You theme. With the Material You redesign, Google’s operating system took on a much more vibrant appearance starting with Android 12. Android can automatically generate a full Material You color scheme for your phone using the colors of your current wallpaper. This will theme important parts of Android, many Google apps, and even some third-party apps.
Color science is used by that automatic theme to make sure there is enough contrast between the things on your screen. For example, if you put light-gray text on a white background, it probably won’t be easy to read.
For the majority of users, Android and Material You’s color choices provide sufficient contrast to distinguish between cards, icons, text, and other elements. But people’s eyes tend to get worse over time, and it eventually helps to have a little bit more contrast in the visuals to stay productive.
In light of this, it would appear that Google intends to make Material You themes a little bit more accessible in Android 14. If you open the Settings app and tap “Color and motion,” you’ll find a new slider called “Contrast Level” in the most recent Developer Preview.
Strangely, the slider doesn’t seem to change Android’s design or colors; raising contrast to the middle or highest settings doesn’t change anything obvious. Despite this, some apps designed for Android 14 take into account the increased contrast levels, as shown below in the demo app for Google’s Material Design Catalog.
At first glance, it might appear that only a few colors are changing, like the color used for the items you’re currently choosing, but if you look closer, you’ll see that a lot of colors change with each option. From the colors of the text and the background to the colors of the accents and the choices, almost everything gets a slightly different hue.
There are currently three choices available for your Material You color contrast Standard, which is the appearance that comes standard, “High,” which has a significantly higher contrast, and a middle option that splits the difference. However, some parts of Material You end up changing to the same color, indicating that the middle option is currently unstable.
In practice, Android 14’s adjustable contrast is very welcome and, if anything, demonstrates Material You’s power and usefulness. Apps that fully adopt Material You will automatically benefit from the increased accessibility because the contrast is changing at the Material You level.