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Re: Testing color contrast as a screen reader user

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Mar 18, 2013 3:39PM

On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 1:25 PM, Birkir R. Gunnarsson wrote:

> I had some issues using wave.webaim.org on a website. It detected 6
> color contrast errors, but my colleague said they were wrong and not
> comparing the right things

We'd be happy to look into what the issues are. WAVE uses some pretty
complex logic to identify *actual* contrast issues - meaning elements
that have defined colors below the WCAG thresholds that actually
present text in that combination. This is not easy to automate due to
CSS inheritance, etc., but I think WAVE does a good job of it. And it
presents the results in an accessible way.

> Similarly, keyboard focus outline issues. Do the standard
> accessibility tools detect and report on vissible keyboard focus
> outlines or not?

We're working on reintroducing this into WAVE. It should soon be
flagging sites that have links that do not have a visible focus
outline. Again, it's pretty hard to detect this in an automated way
because you can't detect focus outlines without actually focusing
(tabbing to) a link. I'm not aware of any other tool that does this.

Jared