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Re: Removing CSS Background image for legibility an Accessibility requirement?

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From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Mar 15, 2022 7:39AM

On 15/03/2022 13:07, JP Jamous wrote:

> Is it a WCAG failure?
> Of course, because white on white provide no visible content. That fails color contrast big time.

However, you're not testing the site as sent by the author - a site that
was using CSS and images as its accessibility-supported baseline
technology. This is essentially testing that once a user has customised
their experience, things still work, which is outside of WCAG. So I'd
disagree here, it's not a WCAG failure (though there is a failure
technique - non-normative, of course -
https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Techniques/general/G148 that seems to
suggest that not setting a fallback colour in addition to an image
background is a failure ... but I'm not sold on this being a hard
failure, again because it relates to the user having modified how the
author-provided content is displayed. I'd say it's more best practice...

Long story short, from my point of view: no, you don't really test sites
these days with CSS or images or JavaScript disabled. That's some
hang-up from old WCAG 1.0 / original Section 508 (before it was 508
Refresh, incorporating WCAG 2.0 by reference). So the scenario of "with
the background image off, you can't see the white on white text" is, to
me, a best practice case rather than an outright failure of WCAG. But
opinions may be split here...

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke

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