How much important is colours in our accessibility designs?

Sometimes the client or the client’s design agency creates the visual design and leaves conversion to HTML + CSS + JavaScript and CMS-ifying to us. When that happens, we almost always find problems with insufficient colour contrast in the design. Sometimes the problems are minor enough to be acceptable, but often there are areas that need to be adjusted.

In case you’re wondering why we care (and why I think you should care) about the colour contrast of a website, it’s very simple. If text does not have sufficient contrast compared to its background, people will have problems. People with colour blindness or other visual impairments as well as people browsing the Web under less than ideal circumstances (bad monitor, window reflections, sunlight hitting the screen) may not be able to read the text, at least not without difficulty. And you don’t really want that, do you? If you publish text on a website, as most people do, we are guessing that in almost all cases it is because you want people to read that text.

There are different algorithms used to calculate contrast colours:

• Luminosity contrast ratio algorithm mentioned by the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.0 working draft.
• Colour brightness and colour difference algorithms used for others that are mentioned in a companion document to WCAG 1.0.

Note that neither of these algorithms are W3C recommendations (at least not yet), but they are still useful for determining if a combination of text and background colours is likely to cause problems for people with colour blindness or other visual impairments.

There are several tools to work with colours:

• Colour Contrast Check
• Colour Contrast Analyser
• CSS Analyser
• Sim Daltonism

Browse the web (2.0) text-only with Lynx

A really long time ago before there were graphical browsers, you could browse the nascent world wide web with text-only browser Lynx. I downloaded and installed Lynx on my Mac. This turned out to be a version from 1999, although there have been some updates since then. The image below shows you what this blog looks like with a text-only browser that doesn’t understand CSS, JavaScript and all the other modern web technologies.

But a well-designed site is still usable this way.

Bringing Accesibility to Web 2.0 (FireVox)

Take a look to this link, i think it is very interesting.

http://www.firevox.clcworld.net/

Related to a comment in our old web site, i think Accesibility should be “A must”, and every internet users should  work on it.

Google Accessible Search

Accessibility is more important in web services every day. Like other post told, there are many people who have difficulties accessing websites, and we can, step by step, try to reduce the problems to access to internet services.

Nowadays, Google is the most popular web search in Internet, because of this, I was looking for how Google work in accessibility applications and I found a new product…

Accessible Web Search for the Visually Impaired is a new product that Google released to enhance the search. First result pages are considered more accessible than result pages in normal Google.

Google Co-op is the technology which created the new tool. It’s a users’ community where they contribute, with their experience and knowledges, to enhance web search for everyone. Co-op modify result pages about different topics or interests.

In my opinion, work in accessibility pages is so important, we don’t know who is the new Einstein or Bill Gates?!?!

Test color blindness experience with this utility

By complete coincidence, I ran into this: Color Oracle. It’s a little tool that lets you modify the colors on your computer screen so that what you see is more or less what someone with color blindness would see. When you select the most common type, deuteranopia, you immediately see that the color red is indistinguishable from green or gray. However, green and red are very often used to signal “good”/”continue” versus “bad”/”stop”, even on the computer.