RE: LVTF position on contrast requirements for interactive control states

Yes I see. That is a problem.  The automatic colors can be puke making or barely legible.

However this conversation goes we should make sure it's reflected in the LVTF findings.

-----Original Message-----
From: "Scott McCormack" <scott.mccormack@ssbbartgroup.com>
Sent: ‎4/‎1/‎2016 12:58 PM
To: "public-low-vision-a11y-tf" <public-low-vision-a11y-tf@w3.org>
Subject: RE: LVTF position on contrast requirements for interactive control states

Setting the selection color isn’t required but in cases where the default colors don’t play nice with the colors used in the page or as in my example the color is changed in such a way that the selected text is unreadable web developers need to consider color contrast for selection as well. I’ve seen cases where selecting text makes it unreadable due to the colors used. The take home message here is selected text should also meet color contrast requirements. Since selection was omitted from the CSS3 spec I don’t know where that leaves us in terms of recommending its use or advising against it.
 
---
Scott McCormack
Principal Technical Consultant  -- IT Manager
SSB BART Group
scott.mccormack@ssbbartgroup.com
(415)624-2712 (o)
www.ssbbartgroup.com
 
From: Wayne Dick [mailto:wayneedick@gmail.com] 
Sent: Friday, April 01, 2016 11:40 AM
To: Scott McCormack <scott.mccormack@ssbbartgroup.com>
Cc: Jonathan Avila <jon.avila@ssbbartgroup.com>; Andrew Kirkpatrick <akirkpat@adobe.com>; Alastair Campbell <acampbell@nomensa.com>; Katie Haritos-Shea <ryladog@gmail.com>; public-low-vision-a11y-tf <public-low-vision-a11y-tf@w3.org>; Rochford, John <john.rochford@umassmed.edu>
Subject: Re: LVTF position on contrast requirements for interactive control states
 
Hi Scott et. al.,
I don't understand the change of color issue in this context. The LVTF does assert the need to change color as a basic need as well as element level customization which allows change of color element by element. Is this a different issue?
Wayne
 
On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 2:54 PM, Scott McCormack <scott.mccormack@ssbbartgroup.com> wrote:
It was in CSS3 draft and was removed but it works in IE, safari and Chrome (and probably others). Firefox has a -moz- variant as well. The problem is that if devs use it and don’t pick a good color combination or they choose to only to change the background color (I’ve seen this in the wild) you can get unreadable selected text. I think it is possible for the browser’s default selection color logic to fail with certain colors as well but I’ve not worked out the specifics for this situation.
 
For example if you put this in the CSS for most pages:
 
::selection {
    background: black;
}
 
// Firefox variant
::-moz-selection {
    background: black;
}
 
The background color for selection will be changed but the text color will not which will result on black text on black since most pages show mostly black text. You can also specify the text color in the CSS rule so we can do something like:
 
::selection {
    background: yellow;
    color: black;
}
 
We end up with nice readable selected text but we lose any color in the selected text, which is probably an acceptable trade off. Since ::seletion isn’t in the CSS3 spec I don’t know where this leaves us in terms of offering any guidance but since it does work I suspect people are using it (I’ll be sure to check the next time I see odd selection colors) and it would be good for us to be able to provide guidance even if it is just along the lines of “Make sure selected text meets color contrast requirements”
 
---
Scott McCormack
Principal Technical Consultant  -- IT Manager
SSB BART Group
scott.mccormack@ssbbartgroup.com<o

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