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

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From: Steve Green
Date: Mar 15, 2022 9:19AM


I agree entirely with Patrick's view on this. However, for those of us working on UK central government websites, it is worth noting that the GDS Service Manual requires that the websites are fully usable without images and/or stylesheets and/or JavaScript, although this is just a policy and has nothing to do with WCAG.

https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/using-progressive-enhancement

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd


-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Patrick H. Lauke
Sent: 15 March 2022 13:40
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Removing CSS Background image for legibility an Accessibility requirement?

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
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Patrick H. Lauke

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