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imwally

I was curious after seeing the accessibility statement what the previous administration's had.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/accessibility/

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/accessibility

https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/accessibility.ht...

https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/accessibility

With that last one not being surprising at all.

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I was surprised that the accessibility widget on the current website has a feature called “high contrast mode” that does not significantly increase the contrast ratio between the primary text and the background. It also significantly lowers the contrast between the secondary text and the background, sometimes as low as 2.1 (7 is the recommended minimum).

Given the icon they chose, it seems like “dark mode” would be a more appropriate name.

Accessibility compliance widgets are such a shot to the nads for accessibility. Sites drop in an accessibility plugin and never think about accessibility again. You need a real audit, and an accessibility first mindset to build a genuinely accessible website.

A data point to support your claim: The main body text becomes white on dark grey with a contrast ratio of 14.22, compared to the original dark blue text on white background with a contrast ratio of 14.93.

Yup. And the red error text that displays on text input forms has a contrast ratio of just over 2. It seems like they just forgot that this error text needs to be a different color when the background color is dark.

"Large font size" doesn't make the actual body text any larger. Is there some interaction with settings encountered with low vision users that makes that make sense?

What is the point of this page besides signaling? It seems completely useless from an informational standpoint.

All of those pages I looked at cite specific things they intend to support (alt tags, text resize) and give a way to reach them. If something stops working, which is incredibly common over a 4-8 year span, a user knows they should be working and have a way to reach out.

Ideally, appropriate accessibility features would just be expected. I'm not intimately familiar with web accessibility, but webaccessibility.com (a random site I found) ranked the landing page for the last three administrations in the mid-to-high 80s.

Ah but to a certain audience that’s all that matters. Follow through and actions are meaningless, it’s what someone appears to say that matters.

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