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Re: Color Contrast List?

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Apr 26, 2013 2:01PM

On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 1:37 PM, Bryan Garaventa wrote:

> I searched around, and found an awesome resource at
> http://www.checkmycolours.com/

A word of caution about this and similar tools...

These tools generally check all possible foreground and background
combinations for all elements. They do not, however, check to ensure
that a particular color combination is actually in use on the page. So
just because it flags a lot of failures does not mean there are
actually contrast issues present on the site. Yes, this information
can still be very valuable, but it can also result in a lot of
confusion or misapplied angst or effort in trying to address issues
that don't exist in reality.

We've put in significant effort to address these issues in the newly
released WAVE tool. It only flags color combinations that are actually
present in the page (meaning there is text present that is also
presented on a particular background color and that exact combination
fails the contrast requirements). This turns out to be quite complex
when you consider CSS inheritance, transparency, etc., and we still
have a few kinks to work out.

The Checkmycolors tool, for example, flags 15 failures on the
WebAIM.org site when there is actually only one instance of text on a
background color that fails WCAG. This particular failure is the only
one that WAVE identifies, thus focusing effort on the actual failure
instead of many potential, but nonexistent, failures.

Jared