diff --git a/autoload/airline/themes/dark.vim b/autoload/airline/themes/dark.vim
index 10f89a0..217b2f1 100644
--- a/autoload/airline/themes/dark.vim
+++ b/autoload/airline/themes/dark.vim
@@ -76,9 +76,13 @@ let g:airline#themes#dark#palette.inactive_modified = {
       \ }
 
 
-" Accents are used to give parts within a section a slightly different look.
-" Here we are defining a "red" accent, which is used by the 'readonly' part by
-" default.
+" Accents are used to give parts within a section a slightly different look or
+" color. Here we are defining a "red" accent, which is used by the 'readonly'
+" part by default. Only the foreground colors are specified, so the background
+" colors are automatically extracted from the underlying section colors. What
+" this means is that regardless of which section the part is defined in, it
+" will be red instead of the section's foreground color. You can also have
+" multiple parts with accents within a section.
 let g:airline#themes#dark#palette.accents = {
       \ 'red': [ '#ff0000' , '' , 160 , ''  ]
       \ }
diff --git a/doc/airline.txt b/doc/airline.txt
index 8277501..9a2d465 100644
--- a/doc/airline.txt
+++ b/doc/airline.txt
@@ -438,6 +438,22 @@ And the following are defined for their respective extensions:
 
 `hunks`, `branch`, `tagbar`, `syntastic`, `whitespace`
 
+-------------------------------------                      *airline-accents*
+Accents can be defined on any part, like so: >
+  call airline#parts#define_accent('foo', 'red')
+<
+This will override the colors of that part by using what is defined in that
+particular accent. In the above example, the `red` accent is used, which means
+regardless of which section the part is used in, it will have red foreground
+colors instead of the section's default foreground color.
+
+The following accents are defined by default. Themes can define their variants
+of the colors, but defaults will be provided if missing. >
+  bold, italic, red, green, blue, yellow, orange, purple
+<
+The defaults configure the mode and line number parts to be bold, and the
+readonly part to be red.
+
 -------------------------------------                     *airline-sections*
 Once a part is defined, you can use helper functions to generate the
 statuslines for each section. For example, to use the part above, we could