When I decorated my current bedroom for the first time, I felt overwhelmed with making decisions and decided that everything would be gray. The walls were a light gray, the duvet was dark gray, the chairs were medium gray, the rug was a gray and ivory pattern, the curtains were charcoal gray— basically, everything except my dresser and desk was gray. I started adding more color eventually, but the room remained very gray. In retrospect, this was not one of the best paint colors for low vision.
I decided it was time for a change, so I enlisted the help of my family to repaint my room and make it a more vibrant space. Making the decision to paint my room was easy, but choosing paint colors with low vision and figuring out what color to paint my wall turned out to be harder than I was expecting (even though my color vision is normal). Here is the guide to choosing paint colors with low vision and redecorating a bedroom with low vision that I wish I had when I started this project.
Think broadly about color and what shades to explore
This step isn’t unique to choosing paint colors with low vision, but it is helpful to consider the role of color in a space, including the feelings it will encapsulate, the goals for a particular room, and existing furniture/items. I found it helpful to explore different colors on the Pinterest app for iPad because it supports Dynamic Text/large print and creators often included specific paint color names or HEX codes.
I have a lot of multicolored items in my room, so I wanted to choose a color that was vibrant and would complement the various items I had arranged throughout my room in rainbow order. At the same time, I did not want something that would be distracting during video calls or that would make it harder for me to use my vision, so I ruled out super-bright shades early on. At this point, I started gravitating towards blue or light teal.
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- How I Use Pinterest For Studying In College
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Consider contrast with furniture
One of the things I disliked about the gray color was how easily items blended together in my room and how some areas had very low contrast. Since I have darker furniture and was choosing paint colors for low vision accessibility, it would be ideal to have lighter-colored walls so that way items would stand out and not blend together. Since I was also moving some furniture around, I wanted to make sure that I could locate items and avoid tripping or running into things as I got used to the new layout.
Since a lot of my existing furniture was neutral colors (except for dark red dressers), I wanted to avoid colors like brown, beige, gray, red, or similar colors that would blend into the space. I was not necessarily aiming to have a super high contrast bedroom that mimicked the color schemes I use for reading on my computer, but I wanted to ensure there was adequate contrast in the space. I knew that blue and/or light teal shades could be strong candidates since I did not have any items in my room in those colors.
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Explore HEX values for favorite colors
While HEX codes are not typically used for walls or interior design, I use tools like video magnifiers, computers, tablets, and phone screens to access a lot of visual information, so I spend a lot of time perceiving colors in my environment through a screen. For this reason, I used HEX color codes to help me identify potential paint colors.
I briefly considered painting my bedroom walls the same purple color as my website background and searched the HEX value online to find a paint match. Reading the HEX value and associated description gave me keywords for the color and characteristics like the saturation, light value, and undertones, which helped me figure out what I liked about this color and why I had gravitated towards it for my website.
I had saved several other HEX values from color palettes I found, so I started exploring these in-depth as well to see if there were any patterns in the type of colors I was suggested. I also used the color picker tool in Canva to choose colors that stood out to me in photos to grab HEX values as well. I noticed that a lot of the colors I was gravitating towards were between 35% and 45% saturation, 70% to 75% lightness, and skewed towards cooler undertones.
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Browse online before selecting paint chips
Once I had an idea of what types of colors I liked and why, I started exploring various paint company websites to check out the different colors that were available; I turned the color filters/display filters I normally use on my devices off to ensure that the colors would be displayed accurately. Looking at a full wall of paint chips overloads my brain to the point I can’t identify any specific color and my vision begins to cut out (a known phenomenon with neurological visual impairment), so browsing at home helped me identify a list of possible paint colors for low vision that I could go check out at the store.
While I didn’t immediately choose the color I ended up using the first time I went online, I found it helpful to keep a running list of colors and their descriptions. At this point, I started shifting more towards sky blue, medium blue, and powdery blue colors, and made a list of paint chips that I wanted to compare.
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- Ten Ways To Reduce Eye Strain From Screens With Technology
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Paint chips and low vision
In full transparency, my (sighted) family members and store associates assisted with locating paint chips on the store wall, because I would not have been able to find these on my own. Since we were the only ones in the store, I ended up leaning in closely to the blue section of the paint chip wall and would pull shades that stood out to me, using my phone as a video magnifier to enlarge the names of the colors and copying them down.
We came back from the store with close to 40 paint chips, and taped them at eye level on my wall, gradually eliminating swatches until I reached the top 5 contenders. To help narrow down to the top three choices, I asked my family members and several friends to weigh in on which colors to consider, and almost everyone (including me) chose the same three shades.
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- How I Use Google Lens With Low Vision
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Test paint on multiple parts of the room, including behind furniture
Again, this advice isn’t specific to choosing paint colors for low vision, but it did help me confirm that the paint colors would provide adequate contrast against the furniture and that it was a color I would love. We purchased paint color samples and painted a small section of every wall in my room, including towards the center of the wall, near the floor, and close to the ceiling.
One of my TSVI friends mentioned that they had used peel-and-stick paint color samples when comparing paint colors for low vision students; the stickers could be repositioned across multiple areas and previewed how the color would look with two coats of paint. We found it more helpful to paint directly on the wall since we needed to figure out how many coats of paint would be needed.
The final three contenders for my room included:
- Daydream CSP-615 (Benjamin Moore)
- San Francisco Bay 802 (Benjamin Moore)
- Soft Jazz 809 (Benjamin Moore)
Choosing a room color with low vision: The big reveal
There isn’t one universal color or a specific paint color for low vision that will work for everyone as visual impairment is a spectrum, not a binary— just like the color wheel!
With that in mind, the process of choosing paint colors for low vision accessibility involved a lot more time at my computer compared to spending time looking at paint chips, because this made it easier for me to browse colors, check out related shades/tints, and find photos online of how the color would look in different spaces. One of the reasons my room was gray to begin with was because I had to strain my eyes a lot more when looking at colors in-person and struggled to locate individual paint chips in a sea of colors, so browsing online worked better this time around.
Finally selecting a room color with low vision
I ended up going with Daydream (CSP-615, #99c1d0), a perfect shade of sky blue that contrasts nicely with all of my furniture/decorations and looks great with any color of the rainbow. My family members, friends, and I all unanimously voted that this would look the best in the space, and we were grateful to only need a single coat!
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More tips for choosing paint colors for low vision
- Make sure to consider the color of the floor/carpet when evaluating color contrast! My family and I still laugh about the fact that the green stairs closely match the green wall, as the stairs look invisible to me with low vision. Learn more about contrast in High Contrast and Low Vision
- Need a way to keep several links organized across platforms? Check out Free Digital Bookmarking Tools For Low Vision
- Designing a room for someone with CVI or that has neurological visual impairment? Read How I Decorate A Bedroom For CVI
Published January 23, 2026. Updated February 2026