How to turn on High Contrast in Windows, and what it does to your programs
In Windows 11 it is Settings, Accessibility, Contrast themes; Left Alt+Left Shift+Print Screen turns it on and off. A contrast theme replaces every program’s colours with a few strong ones of your choosing, which only works well in programs built to follow it.
15 October 2026 · 4 min read
Turning it on
- Windows 11: Settings, Accessibility, Contrast themes. Choose Aquatic, Desert, Dusk or Night sky and press Apply. Edit, beside the list, changes the colours of a theme.
- Windows 10: Settings, Ease of Access, High contrast, with the themes High Contrast Black, High Contrast White and two more.
- From the keyboard, on either: Left Alt+Left Shift+Print Screen turns the last theme you used on, and again turns it off.
What it does
A contrast theme is not a colour scheme for Windows alone. It hands every program a short list of colours (the background, text, links, selected text, buttons and text that cannot be used yet) and asks the program to draw with those and nothing else. Pictures in documents keep their colours; everything the program itself draws should change.
That makes text sharp against its background for people with low vision, and it cuts the glare of a white page for people for whom bright screens are painful.
High Contrast is not dark mode
Dark mode (Settings, Personalisation, Colours) asks programs that offer a dark look to use it, and each program chooses its own dark colours. A contrast theme decides the colours itself, from a handful, with as much difference between text and background as you set. Dark mode is a preference; a contrast theme is for when ordinary colours are hard to read at all.
If neither suits, Windows has two more aids: Colour filters (Settings, Accessibility, Colour filters) for colour blindness, and the Magnifier, whose colour inversion (Ctrl+Alt+I) inverts everything under it.
When a program does not follow it
Programs that draw their own colours, rather than taking the system’s, can go wrong under a contrast theme in a few familiar ways: icons drawn in a colour that matches the new background vanish, the item you have selected looks the same as every other, and the focus, the outline that shows where the keyboard is, disappears.
If a program you depend on does this, see whether it has a high-contrast option of its own, and tell its makers; it is an accessibility fault, and it is fixable. Web pages in Edge and Chrome follow the theme by default, and a site that breaks under it has the same fault.
Our own product, disclosed
Where our own software comes into this
We make Rutba Office, a free desktop suite for Windows. Since version 2.1 every app follows Windows’ contrast themes with the system’s own colours: the chosen, pressed and current items are outlined, edges and the focus ring are drawn, and icons take the system’s text colour, so none of them disappears.
Its own dark theme is a separate thing, as dark mode is in Windows, and since 2.0 its colours have been measured for readable text in every app. Our accessibility statement says what is met and what is not.
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