Skip to content

Economist and Apache ECharts Case Study

Status: draft Scope: full-length Leonardo-style and OKLCH comparison of two unexpectedly strong reference palettes Source: Reference Categorical Palette Corpus

This note compares the full published palette lengths for The Economist and Apache ECharts. Both performed unusually well in the first-five accessibility pass, even though stylistically they are not direct templates for DFT.

The chart pairs two lenses:

  • full-length Leonardo-style weighted fail-rate curves
  • all-slot OKLCH hue/chroma placement for the authored colors

Delta E is a perceptual color-distance score. Lower values mean colors become harder to distinguish; higher values mean clearer separation.

The Economist

  • full length: 10 colors
  • weighted fail rate at step 5: 0.5%
  • weighted fail rate at full length: 7.2%
  • weakest full-set Delta E: 0.3
  • weakest full-set pair: c4-c10 (achromatopsia)

Apache ECharts

  • full length: 11 colors
  • weighted fail rate at step 5: 0.6%
  • weighted fail rate at full length: 6.5%
  • weakest full-set Delta E: 0.4
  • weakest full-set pair: c3-c6 (achromatopsia)

Economist and Apache ECharts case study