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Re: 1.4.1 use of color for state indicator

for

From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Mar 10, 2020 8:07AM

On 10/03/2020 12:34, Mallory wrote:

> Use of Color claims to be a sub-set of "forms of perception" (esp under 1.3.3 which unfortunately strictly limits itself mostly to textual instructions, when in real life designers have been relying on visual recognition/intuition to self-explain how a lot of content and interactives work, for years), so I would not include things like borders, outlines, symbols, etc. I would even wager the "reasonable man" would not either.
>
> Perhaps naïve, but it seems easy to take Use of Color and read it to mean "color" and not "vision"; stretching it to such seems disingenuous. Again, whether that's hue or luminosity or Toilet Duck aside. While people can argue on hue vs luminosity, taking it to borders and symbols just seems a bit silly when you take a step back. Ask 100 people what "colour" means and while you're sure to get a variety of answers, borders/outlines/images are very unlikely to be in that.
>
> "but everything is technically nothing more than coloured pixels on a screen" would not be a useful degradation of terms. That we must cross half of a distance to somewhere in order to reach it, infinitely, and thus technically can never reach any destination is another example of not being useful. People reach destinations. People who can see, don't always see colour. If my user stylesheet changes more than colour, then it's outside this SC anyway, isn't it?
>
> If I have *no* vision, I have assistive technology to access the text-based alternative (if that's what there is), but the Use of Color seems to me directly to people who DO have vision, use their vision, and rely on their vision; and because relying on colour is something devs and designers seem to specifically do a lot AND apparently forget about AND need a dedicated SC shoved in their faces to stop relying on colour alone to convey info.

But all this is my point for why the understanding document, which lists
Braille displays and text-only displays, is wrong to list them. So we're
agreed it's about vision/visible things (leaving Braille/text-only to
the side).

Now, people not being able to perceive color changes is different from
people not being able to perceive something as dramatic as a total
inversion of foreground/background, or some very strong changes in
contrast ratio, I would argue. Which I think is what - based on pushback
at the time of publication when 2.0 came out - led to that escape clause
in F73 that brought contrast into play and that by the backdoor
redefinition of "color = hue".

But it all comes down, to me, to the problem that:

- the SC itself says one thing, while its understanding doc currently
implies other things
- the escape clause about contrast is hidden away in a technique - if it
really is valid, it should be promoted to be part of the actual
understanding at least (while still debatable, at least it's a debate
that we're more likely to have, rather than something that's hidden away
in a technique that only few people really took the time to spot)

As for the "reasonable man" ... I really wish WCAG was more nuanced, and
that it could be applied/evaluated with nuance. Sadly, currently, the
binary nature of pass/fail, and the fact that some legislations have
basically taken it as the benchmark for pass/fail, makes it problematic
to allow for nuance, which is why we end up with arbitrary lines in the
sand, over-complex definitions that try to still unambiguously define
something that requires far more contextual evaluation, etc.

But anyway, that's me just rattling off my a11yTO talk again...

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke

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