Stark: Accessibility Inside Figma for Checking Contrast and Color Blindness
Stark is a Figma plugin that checks contrast, simulates color blindness, and tests focus and touch targets. What it does, what it costs in 2026, and its limits.
What is Stark?
It is a Figma plugin built to catch accessibility problems while you design. Instead of waiting for code to exist, you run it on frames, components, and styles in the file.
The official plugin page lists as features the contrast checker with color suggestions, focus order, landmarks, a vision simulator covering protanopia, tritanopia, achromatopsia and others, touch target sizes, typography checks, alt-text annotations, and a live preview in the browser (Stark, “Figma plugin”). The page says it helps teams build software that meets “the latest accessibility standards”.
What does it cost today?
This changes often, so confirm it at the source. As of November 2026, the official pricing page lists these plans: Premium Pack, from 198 US dollars per user per year with a minimum of three seats; Launch, from 2,500 dollars a year; Grow, from 8,000 dollars a year; and Scale, from 21,000 dollars a year. It also offers a free team account to start with, without detailing its limits.
The plans don’t differ only in price. According to the comparison table, Premium Pack covers 10 pages, with manual scans and reports stored for 14 days. Launch goes up to 100 pages with weekly scans and also supports code repositories and public URLs. Grow and Scale add CI/CD, iOS and Android apps, ticketing integration, an automated draft VPAT, and single sign-on (SSO).
Several comparison sites publish lower monthly prices that don’t match the official page, so don’t use them for budgeting.
Before paying, ask yourself what you actually need. If you only want to check the contrast of a couple of screens, one of the many free contrast plugins may be enough. Stark makes more sense when the team has to review many components, share accessibility decisions, and keep a record of what was checked.
Why should a designer care?
Because contrast and color blindness problems are easier to solve before coding. If secondary gray text fails contrast, fixing it in Figma takes minutes. Fixing it afterwards across twenty components takes days.
BrowserStack, which reviews several accessibility plugins, highlights Stark’s contrast checking, its simulation of visual deficiencies, and its real-time feedback on WCAG compliance, and recommends using its suggestions to build inclusive color schemes (BrowserStack, “Best Figma plugins to design for accessibility”).
To understand what a contrast value measures and why it passes or fails, the math of color contrast gives you the background you need to read the results.
How does it fit into a real workflow?
A simple flow:
- Check the palette before composing screens. Test the most used text and background pairs, including error and focus states.
- Simulate vision. Look at the main screen with protanopia and tritanopia. If a state depends only on color, you’ll see it right away.
- Review focus order and landmarks. These are the points most often lost between design and code.
- Write alt text for images that carry meaning.
- Document what you decided. If a contrast value is accepted for a reason, leave a note in the file.
One detail people forget: if your product has a dark mode, run the same checks on that theme. A color pair that passes in light mode can fail in dark mode, and a result from one theme says nothing about the other.
Example
Illustrative example: a team designs a metrics panel where the “at risk” and “on target” states differ only by red and green. When they simulate protanopia in Stark, the two states blur together. The designer adds an icon and a text label, checks the contrast of the new text, and documents the change in the component. None of those steps required coding.
What Stark does NOT do
- It doesn’t audit code. A button can look right in Figma and be implemented badly. For that, browser tools such as axe DevTools exist.
- It doesn’t replace people. A vision simulation is an approximation. Testing with screen readers and with people who use assistive technology is still needed (screen reader testing).
- It doesn’t fix the design for you. It suggests colors, but brand and hierarchy decisions are still yours.
- It doesn’t cover dynamic content. States that appear through interaction or animation need review in the real product.
Common mistakes
- Trusting that a “pass” in Figma guarantees accessibility.
- Checking only the main screen and not the error, empty, and focus states.
- Fixing contrast by darkening everything and losing the visual identity.
- Using color blindness simulation as the only color test.
- Budgeting with comparison-site prices instead of the official page.
How to start tomorrow
Open your product’s file and run the contrast checker on the most visited screen. List the failures, starting with small text. Then simulate protanopia and check whether any state depends only on color. With that list, open a ticket in your task tracker and another for the accessibility review in your process. If the problem is already in production, take the case to a code review with axe.