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

for

From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Feb 19, 2021 3:41AM

Hey Tim,

had a quick look, and just some random observations:

- yes, it's acceptable to have a style/theme selector to allow users to
switch to a high-contrast set of colors
- if the higher contrast theme is set by default, even better
- even when the other themes are enabled (e.g. Light), the theme
switcher should nonetheless be clearly visible - otherwise, if a user
that has difficulty with low contrast elements lands on a documentation
site where the contrasty theme was not set as default (or somebody else
used the system on that same machine before and set it to something else
with lower contrast), they should be able to find the switch regardless
- otherwise you get into the "yes, we offer a switch to change to better
contrast, but you can't see it because the switch currently has too low
contrast" paradoxical scenarios
- agree that the paintbrush icon may not be immediately clear/obvious to
users
- minor, but the big "The Rust Programming Language" title has slightly
insufficient contrast, even in your higher contrast theme

Unrelated to contrast, might be worth mentioning that this could really
do with a skip link - by default the sidebar seems to be open, meaning
that for a keyboard user reaching the page, they first need to tab
through ALL the links in the left-hand sidebar before reaching the
actual main part / the controls that would allow them to close the
sidebar. Having a skip link before all those links that jumps directly
to the "Toggle the Table of Contents" control would be good (and when
the TOC is closed, that skip link could be removed/made inactive, as
THEN it serves no purpose).

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke

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