RE: Accessibility of two extremes

People’s needs are so varied that you can’t come up with one colour scheme that suits everyone. I advocate the inclusion of a style switcher to make a variety of colour schemes available.

This is one of the accessibility community’s “holy wars”, and some people take the view that we should not replicate tools that are available in browsers. That is not my view, especially since browsers’ colour settings are only effective on the very simplest of websites. Likewise, custom stylesheets or browser extensions such as Stylus require a lot of effort just to get them to work with one website.

If you do implement a style switcher, the question is how complex to make it. I have seen some that allow users to choose a vast variety of text and background colours – in my view that’s making it too complex. 3 or 4 pre-set options will probably be enough to meet most people’s needs if you choose them carefully, but there will always be someone who wants something different.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd


From: Charissa Ramirez <MariaCharissa.Ramirez@customerservice.nsw.gov.au>
Sent: 01 September 2020 08:22
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Accessibility of two extremes

WCAG is quite clear with the colour contrast ratios we need to meet.

But meeting contrast requirements is not enough; people perceive colour differently.

Our situation: We have accordions with black text (#000000) on a light grey (#F4F4F7) background, with a contrast ratio of 19.1: 1.
On hover, the background becomes light blue, so #000000 on #CCDFEA produces a contrast ratio of 15.3:1.

While this combination meets contrast ratios one user has reached out to us that because of their total colour blindness, they find the text on grey background ‘extremely hard to read’.

I understand that people will have very different experiences of vision loss and of colour perception loss. I also understand that there could be co-existing conditions for this user that adds to their difficulties.

The solution that we find is to make the accordion just black text on white background. We will also apply variations of bold text and lines to differentiate the states (on hover, etc).

If we adjust to meet the requirements to one type of user at the other end of the spectrum would it result to making the results not as accessible for another type of user at the other end of the spectrum?

For example, is black text on white background not as accessible for people with dyslexia?

Will it be tiring for people with issues with too high contrast?

How will you provide balance in this situation?

We will also appreciate further references and research about these conditions and application of WCAG guidelines if there are any you can provide.

Thanks.

Kind regards
Charissa Ramirez

UX Team, Digital Channels

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