Designing an accessible color palette with magic numbers | Hacker News Reader

Designing an accessible color palette with magic numbers

darekkay.com

15 pointsdarekkay12 comments

Right at the top of the article it points to hacker news using insufficient contrast. BUT, clearly the author is not familiar with the site because the example they give in the screenshot is of a comment which has intentionally been rendered with extremely low contrast because of the number of negative votes it has received.

Technically, this violates ADA guidelines on contrast, but I think it is a completely legitimate use.

Apparently, the author already pointed to this "issue" in another blog article:

https://darekkay.com/blog/accessible-ui-frameworks/

I wonder if he does this to generate a bit of intrigue. :)

Author here. I've chosen HN as an example because of different reasons. a) I am using HN often, so I experience this issue myself b) This is a developer blog, so visitors may be familiar with HN c) The simplicity of HN and the minimal changes that were applied over the years is a great thing. However, HN has many accessibility issues (the downvoted screenshot being an extreme example of), which I hope they will fix in the future.

The stated purpose of the WCAG accessibility guidelines is that disabled people should be able to access the same content.

If you can read the negative voted comment, but another person can't, then it is not a "legitimate" violation. Why is it right that some disabled people shouldn't have access to that content?

If you have a great deal of trouble reading poor contrast, shouldn't you have a local solution for that in the browser instead of relying on every site to provide a high contrast theme?

If contrast is used to make some comments harder to read as a way to de-emphasise them from the discussion, then end result is that the visibility of the comment is determined by your level of eyesight (or the quality of your monitor), rather then any conscious decision by the reader.

A visibility toggle would serve the same purpose and make the experience of reading discussion threads the same regardless of personal ability or the screen you're using.

I read that as a small joke. Most comments are much higher contrast so that author must have seen that low contrast isn’t the norm.

When referencing hacker news as “the orange site” I would definitely assume that kind of familiarity.

That's correct :) Additionally, this was just an extreme example, but the front page of HN currently has 237 occurrences of insufficient contrast ratio.

Author here. As others already stated, this is not a legitimate use in my opinion. As of WCAG, there is only one legitimate use of text which may not pass the contrast ratio levels: disabled state (e.g. disabled buttons).

I am aware that this is only applied to downvoted comments. But using an insufficient contrast ratio excludes the _readers_, not the posters. There are accessible ways to deemphasize unwanted comments.

BTW, HN currently has 237 occurrences of insufficient contrast ratio on the front page. While my example was an extreme one, even regular content is not sufficient on HN, unfortunately.

The whole idea is to make the downvoted comment less accessible, predicated on the idea that the readers don't want to read it. Evidence supporting that idea that they don't want to read it is the fact that they downvoted it (or rather those representatives among the readership who are able to downvote chose to do so).

Though I agree that HN is rife with examples of poor contrast. For instance, when you are looking at a submission's comments, the submission title at the top is in poor contrast.

As I'm editing, the toolbar right above above my comment "1 point by kazinator 2 minutes ago | parent | edit | delete ..." is in poor contrast.

The idea there seems to be to deemphasize non-content.

> The whole idea is to make the downvoted comment less accessible, predicated on the idea that the readers don't want to read it. Evidence supporting that idea that they don't want to read it is the fact that they downvoted it (or rather those representatives among the readership who are able to downvote chose to do so).

I'm totally getting the motivation, but it doesn't solve the accessibility issue. If some people with high karma decide that a comment is low quality, then by all means, HN could collapse the comment by default. Totally fine with me, because everyone else can still access it if they choose to. With the current solution, many people don't get this chance. Accessibility is about equal treatment.

The problem is that "less accessible" for some users is "completely inaccessible" to others. That's against the intention: the goal was to make it easier to ignore, but not vanish entirely.

A higher-contrast option would solve it, but configuration always introduces new headaches. It's best when all users can be satisfied with the same display (using their own configurations, such as browser settings). Which is too bad, because the low-contrast display is a clever approach to de-emphasize poor content, but it doesn't work for all users.

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