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Comment by soperj | Hacker News Reader

Why is that seemingly every single article about color on the web never meets accessibility guidelines for contrast of text to background?

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Hello, author here.

I realize the color palette might not be the most readable as I tried to use my "signature palette". Anyway I did check the contrast, and it passes the recommendations I found. If you can pin point a place where it does not, I'd be happy to fix it.

If you run Chrome Lighthouse you will get a list of all the color contrast issues.

Thanks, I ran the tool and the text/background is fine, but there are a few places where it is not (mainly code blocks). I'll fix it.

I wasn't trying to blame you specifically, so sorry if it feels that way. There's a lot of things posted about color. No one seems to take accessibility seriously, and in that space it should be one of the few things taken into account.

None of your header text or link text passes WCAG standards. So I don't know what recommendations you were looking at.

Don't feel bad, I do take accessibility seriously, and I'm happy I got feedback.

Your main heading is barely visible [1] (font-weight: 100 is only good on macs, where fonts all get thickened by the system on display).

The colour of it (#4D644F on #090D1D) fails WCAG AAA at both large and small sizes.

The colour of every code tag (#6B7280 on #281234) also fails WCAG AAA and has readability reduced by having a contrasting edge against the background.

Your "last update" text at the problem is also lacking contrast.

That was just from glancing through (and copying numbers around). However, it is made worse by blue-light exposure reduction software (like that built in to Windows 10, Android and others, or provided by f.lux).

[1] https://imgur.com/a/G6g0vNG

Thanks for the screenshot, I will fix it. It is not that thin on my linux box, but I did tune fontconfig.

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