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Is this attempt at increasing contrast for a documentation system any good?

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From: Tim Small
Date: Feb 19, 2021 3:18AM

Sorry if this isn't the best place to ask (if-so, please let me know
what would be!).

I'm trying to improve the accessibility of "mdBook" - which is used to
generate web pages from markdown - mainly for technical documentation.

The system is used extensively to create the documentation for the Rust
programming language, but is also gaining popularity elsewhere.

Unfortunately I personally have no experience of accessibility work (and
very little web or UI work - I mainly work on embedded data collection
devices, and servers), so I'd really appreciate any feedback on this
effort (which is done voluntarily / in my spare time).

Low-contrast text is quite hard for me to read, so initially I'm
focussing on improving the color contrast...

mdBook allows the end-user to choose between a few different color
pallets, but the default "Light" scheme has pretty low contrast.

In the test page below, I've added a "Contrast" theme, which aims to
improve the contrast, without straying far from the "Light" theme||
aesthetic.

Since the system is used for programming language documentation, it
features "syntax highlighting", which uses a variety of colors to
highlight code text blocks.  I found it quite challenging making each of
these colors contrast against both the background, and also from each other!

Both themes can be seen on this static html rendering:
https://buttersideup.com/rustbook/ch04-02-references-and-borrowing.html
<https://buttersideup.com/rustbook/ch04-02-references-and-borrowing.html>

... the original "Light" scheme will be displayed by default, and the
"Contrast" theme can be selected with the paintbrush icon (positioned
top-left).

I know that icon itself isn't great (particularly in the "Light" color
scheme!), but the mdBook project maintainer favours making the new
contrast theme the default, so hopefully that will help there too...

Any feedback welcome!

Cheers,

Tim.