Re: Proposed Final Design for W3C Technical Reports style in 2016

On 01/04/2016 03:47 PM, John Foliot wrote:
>
> Hi All,
>
> Fantasai, while I appreciate that you've made the link less faint, the color
> used (#C0C0C0) still fails a color-contrast test.
> (http://snook.ca/technical/colour_contrast/colour.html#fg=C0C0C0,bg=FFFFFF)
>
> Title: Screen capture - Description: A screen capture of the sample page,
> with the color contrast analyzer tool inset, showing the color contrast fail
>
> Figure 1: A screen capture of the sample page, with a color contrast
> analyzer tool inset, showing the color contrast fail
>
> To be crystal clear, the WCAG 2.0 Recommendation only speaks of “text”
> when referencing color contrast (so for example, it does NOT speak to
> icons, etc.), however since **underlined text** is indeed recognized
> as a link, I would argue that the color contrast requirement would be
> in play here, as the underlining is part of the active text, and that
> the visual indicator should be as visible as the text it is underlining.

It's a reasonable argument on the surface, but actually, I think the
contrast requirement for an underline isn't as stringent. Unlike text,
for an underline you only need to be able to distinguish that it's
there, not distinguish which of a variety of shapes it is.

I've tried increasing the contrast, but I run into a few problems trying
to do that. I have to balance:
   * contrast with the foreground color, so that it's visible
   * contrast with the text color, so that it's easy to visually filter
     out the link style and focus on the paragraph text
   * contrast between visited and non-visited links, so that they can
     be distinguished

One thing I could do is to swap the darker color for unvisited links, and
the lighter color (harder to see, but also less intrusive) for visited ones.

> Suggestion: could you lighten the line weight, darken it and perhaps use
> dashes or dots instead? (see in-page links at WCAG - http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20).
> I’m not a graphics person however, so feel free to explore other
> alternatives. Jonathan Snook’s online color contrast tool is quite useful
> there: http://snook.ca/technical/colour_contrast/colour.html

Lightening the weight or using dashes/dots instead would allow me to
follow the letter of the WCAG rule without actually following its
spirit: lighter-weight or discontinuous lines are perceptually lighter
in color, even though the screen pixels will test at a higher contrast.
So I don't think that's actually helping real people, even though it'll
help the color-contrast checker.

I can do the opposite, though: make them thicker, so that they're easier
to perceive even though the colors are the same. :)

It would look like this:
   http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/style/design/w3c-restyle/2016/sample

~fantasai

Received on Monday, 4 January 2016 23:40:02 UTC