- From: olivier Thereaux <ot@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 09:47:57 +0900
- To: Daniel Barclay <daniel@fgm.com>
- Cc: www-qa@w3.org
Hello Daniel. On Aug 15, 2006, at 04:29 , Daniel Barclay wrote: > On the page at http://www.w3.org/QA/, it appears that much of the text > is some shade of gray (instead of being fully black). Indeed, the text is a dark gray with a very slight blue hue, which was meant to be more pleasing to the eye given the colors on the rest of the page. > Given that CRT and LCD displays already have limited contrast, why > throw > away even more of the available contrast and make things harder to > read > by using gray text? I would agree with you if the background had been a shade of gray close to that of the text, but with a plain white background (luminance 100), the #33444A text (luminance 27) seems to be more than enough: calculations show that the luminosity contrast ratio for that text is 10.5, which satisfies even the highest level mentioned by the web content acessibility guidelines: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/guidelines.html#visual-audio-contrast- contrast Could we have chosen plain black instead? yes. But the colors chosen appear to be a better tradeoff between aesthetic value (which is always arguable) and accessibility (which is rather relative, but we are in a very safe range). regards, -- olivier
Received on Tuesday, 15 August 2006 00:47:13 UTC