RE: Non-text contrast research

My personal thoughts from reviewing the recording are that the goal seems to be to get research findings that support the material design tenants that borders are not needed and that other subtle affordances are acceptable because in the end after some amount of time the user can just figure it out.

When people with low vision look at a page we may only see small parts of the page and rely on other visual factors such as borders and non-word indicators when we can’t read the text that is in our best vision.    We do this to find and locate items.   Searching for a word on a page is extremely difficult with low vision – that’s why control+f is so important.  There is also visual latency where users with visual impairments take time to find something and may miss something they should otherwise be able to see – but miss it the first time.   Making the user rely on reading all the words or wading through little font differences to eventually figure out that something is actionable is not realistic for real people with disabilities.  This study doesn’t address the needs of users with cognitive and learning disabilities and seems to focus on expert users who are employees of Google.  There are many other aspects of this case such as relying on users to mouse over something, etc.  that raise questions about the exact methods used.  While I applaud the effort to conduct research – I personally feel there are to many confounding variables and not enough attention paid to the amount of time and other disabilities that make the results of limited use.

On many pages I resort to setting a large focus indicator with the Stylus extension and tabbing around and also setting a border on actionable elements via hover and mousing around to try and determine actionable elements on a page.

For me lack of borders causes the issue of not knowing the hit area for a target unless the mouse changes and then if there are two elements close by I’m not certain of which one is being targeted.  Borders provides confidence that I am within the hit area.   Lack of borders also is confusing regarding how things are related or grouped as it may be unclear what items are in the group or the type of action.  For example, the word “yes” by itself could be a yes radio button or a “yes” button.  One is checkable while the other performs some action that may take me somewhere else.  Having borders like square and circles gives me some affordance to know the type of response that will occur.  These are important aspects that must be considered.

Jonathan
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From: Alastair Campbell <acampbell@nomensa.com>
Sent: Friday, May 17, 2019 11:39 AM
To: W3C WAI ig <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Subject: RE: Non-text contrast research

CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe.

Hi Everyone,

Hopefully people will get a chance to review the slides and/or video I posted from Michael Gilbert and the team at Google [1]. Michael is now on this email group so can join in.

I thought I start the comments with what I took way from the results:


  *   The structure of the criteria text gives us some flexibility, where it says “Visual information required to identify user interface components and states”, if research finds that X, Y & Z other factors make the contrast irrelevant in a particular scenario that can be addressed fairly easily.

That is already the case for buttons where the understanding doc [2] says buttons don’t require borders.
  *   The remit of the guidelines is to prevent barriers that affect people with disabilities, it would be useful to have a control group or a comparison with other usability testing to help work out which factors impact people with low vision, compared to a general audience. (Not that it is a deciding factor, but it’s part of the equation.)
  *   I fully appreciate that more examples would help, but to make that a manageable task it would help to know which types of component people have struggled to apply the criteria to. Presumably the examples in the understanding document [2] cover some cases, which other components are people concerned with?
  *   This criteria (non-text contrast) is focused on having contrast for certain aspects, but it does not require particular design approaches/affordances. E.g. if an input doesn’t have any border it isn’t required to have a contrasting one.
However, lack of affordance is an issue for many folk (particularly with cognitive impairments [3]), it would be great to re-run the study with participants with cognitive impairments.
I’d just note that my brain is fairly wired-up to how the guidelines work, so I hope people less biased by that can comment as well 😊

Kind regards,

-Alastair

1] Page with video and link to slides:
https://alastairc.uk/tests/wcag21-examples/ntc-research-video.html

NB: If the slides don’t work in your screenreader make sure the accessibility setting is on:
https://support.google.com/docs/answer/6282736


2] Understanding doc:
https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/non-text-contrast.html


3] COGA doc:
https://w3c.github.io/coga/techniques/index.html#use-clear-visual-affordances


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www.nomensa.com<http://www.nomensa.com/> / @alastc