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Re: Testing color contrast as a screen reader user

for

From: Michael R. Burks
Date: Mar 18, 2013 5:35PM

This is a great discussion.

In particular these two items are in my opinion very much neglected.

I do a lot of testing, and it would be helpful if the Wave could help with
focus issues. Nothing is perfect. For example I often use ZoomText and it
even misses some things, but nonetheless this would be great.

The color contrast issues would also be terrific as they are difficult to
do even when you are looking at them.

Thanks to all the folks at WebAIM for working on this.

Sincerely,

Mike Burks
919-882-1884 - Fax
919-349-6661 - Office

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Jared Smith
Sent: Monday, March 18, 2013 5:40 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Testing color contrast as a screen reader user

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
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