gavinwood•2d agoOG Member

That Friday my accessibility audit hit 47 failures

I was prepping a client's landing page for launch last spring and ran a contrast check on the hero section. Every single text overlay failed WCAG AA, 47 issues total, because the client insisted on a pale yellow background with white buttons. The whole afternoon was me calling them up and walking through each fail one by one until they finally agreed to swap the yellow for a darker tan. Has anyone else had to fight a client over color choices that seemed obvious to you?

2 comments

2 Comments

diana_bell742d ago

Actually that's not quite how WCAG contrast ratios work (and I learned this the hard way too). Text overlays on images get graded against the full image, you know, not just one solid color. If that pale yellow had a dark enough shadow or texture behind the text, some of those 47 fails might have actually passed. I remember fixing a similar mess where the client's "white buttons" had a different visual weight than the white text, so the contrast between the button background and the button text was the real issue, not the text against the yellow. Color theory is a beast, but once you start measuring the actual color values instead of just eyeballing it, the fights get way easier (or at least more data-driven).

simon_black2d ago

Huh, I never really thought about it that way with the full image thing honestly. I used to just grab the most dominant color and test against that, totally missing how shadows or gradients change the whole calculation. That button example you gave really hit for me too, I had a project where the white text looked fine on a light blue background until you measured the actual values and it was like a 3.5 ratio, not the 4.5 we were aiming for. Measuring instead of eyeballing is probably the takeaway I need to remember for next time.