Ooh, I’m a fan!
3 Likes
No one’s recommending low -contrast!
Some people do.
At one point the Google UI guidelines said body text, by default, should be black on white, which, by most measures, is the maximum contrast. But a sentence or two later, it said the text should be only 80% opaque, which is a pretty big step down in contrast. (If I recall correctly, the 80% opacity guideline was later revised to 90%.) And that was the starting level. Hierarchically less important text would have even lower contrast, which might have been acceptable if the first step hadn’t already limited so much of the gamut.
The WCAG 2.1 minimum contrast guidelines are problematic in a many ways, but they were the only game in town.
Many web designers (and style guide authors) saw those minimum contrast levels as target contrast levels. And they often ignore that WCAG called out those minimums as insufficient for small and/or thin fonts. Many designers have confessed to me that they would much rather optimize for overall appearance even if it means sacrificing some readability. When I asked authors of those guidelines why they mandate reduced contrast text, they said it was because it looked better. Nobody justified it as improving readability or accessibility.
All the tools I’ve seen that check designs for compliance with the WCAG 2.1 guidelines look only at the color pairs instead of comparing neighboring pixel values as specified by WCAG’s test procedure. As a result, the checking tool can give a high score that easily exceeds the AAA level even though the rendered text barely passes the actual test at the AA level.
I hope WCAG 3.0 and APCA does better, but it’s literally an impossible problem to solve. Without being able to control or sense the monitor settings and viewing conditions, there’s literally no way for a program or web page to offer the ideal contrast for a typical user, let alone a specific reader.
That said, I find the body text in that APCA checker page very uncomfortable and taxing to read. It’s not just the contrast, but that’s definitely part of it.
The best option is to try to choose reasonable defaults and to give users the ability to tune things for their own purposes. If you think a reasonable default is to drop the contrast by 10 or even 20%, fine. But please let me crank it back up.
2 Likes
I meant no one here is. Yes, the degree of concern for accessibility and readability on the Web at large is dismal.
All I’m talking about is avoiding stark white backgrounds. For instance, on my I7 Docs Web Remix I use #FAFAEF for the background in light-mode. By WCAG 2.x reckoning that’s a contrast ratio of 19.98:1 as opposed to the maximal 21:1 contrast of black on pure white. (Also, it’s a variable-weight font and the font-weight is boosted to 475 instead of the default 400 for normal weight. By APCA reckoning it’s Lc 102.6 where the maximum is Lc 106.)
3 Likes