Using text alternatives for meaningful colour

Accessible tables do not use colour or shading alone to convey meaning. For example, the use of green, yellow and red squares to show low-, medium- and high-risk categories will not be picked up by a screen reader, and colourblind or vision-impaired users may not be able to differentiate the colours:

You can still use colours as an aid for people who are not visually impaired, but you should also include a text element that conveys the same meaning – for example, by writing values in the cells and providing a code below the table:

Better still is to write what the colour means in each coloured cell:

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