Three months of avoiding color checkers, then the assistive tech test humbled me

I used to think those WCAG contrast calculators were overkill. My eyes are fine, I can read my own stuff, so why bother? Then last Tuesday I ran a live demo through a screen reader with a color blindness filter, the one my coworker Dana uses. The orange on gray I loved turned into invisible mush, and the green text just vanished. I felt dumb because Dana said she mentioned it twice, and she did, I just waved it off. Now I run every palette through a free simulator before I even open Figma, and I ask people with low vision instead of guessing. It took a 10 minute test to beat 5 years of stubbornness, so has anyone else had that humbling moment with a color tool?

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blair_dixon2d ago

The same thing happened to me about a year ago, except it was a coworker who finally made me sit with her and watch her navigate our site. She uses a magnifier plus a harsh contrast setting, and my carefully chosen “soft” colors just turned into brown sludge on her screen. I felt awful because she had told me three times that the text was hard to read, and I kept saying it was fine because it looked fine to me. After that, I started testing with a free browser extension that lets you toggle different color blindness modes, and I also grabbed a cheap pair of those glasses that simulate low vision. Now I always check my palettes that way before I send anything to anyone else, and it takes maybe two minutes extra, so there’s really no excuse.