Colour Contrast and Text Shadows

• From: James Nurthen <james.nurthen@oracle.com>
• Date: Thu, 3 Nov 2011 09:02:21 -0700
• To: WCAG <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
• Message-Id: <6109B4AA-3A27-4930-A7C2-D98928BD23B8@oracle.com>

I was posed an interesting question the other day about the use of text shadows to overcome colour contrast issues

This is similar to the "Readable White Text" example at http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/text-shadow.en.html

Can someone use a text shadow in order to meet the colour contrast requirement? It seems like they should be able to - as the example on the page above seems very readable, but I'm not sure how I would go about determining the luminosity contrast ratio of the above example as the ratio is different at different parts of the letter.

A similar - but related - question has also been posed to me about text over css gradients. Were the background colour is a gradient (or a pattern) which point do we use in order to determine the luminosity contrast ratio?

Regards,
James

Received on Thursday, 3 November 2011 16:02:59 UTC