Join a treasure-hunting journey into one of the web’s most overlooked accessibility environments: Forced Colors Mode. Used in Windows Contrast Themes by millions of people every day, this mode replaces an interface’s carefully chosen color system with a limited, user-defined palette. In a single click, every carefully crafted color and UI design can be overwritten.

Through real interface demos and guided exploration, we’ll learn what happens when design decisions give way to system-level color preferences and how to build products that still work when that happens. We’ll cover how browsers apply color in Forced Colors Mode, what happens to our CSS and how to test and emulate these environments during development.

Blending story-driven narrative with practical technical guidance, this session equips teams to design and build resilient interfaces that remain clear, usable, and trustworthy even when users, not designers, control how it's rendered.