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Comment by bandergirl | Hacker News Reader

> In practice, samples meeting the WCAG 2.1 recommendations are harder to read than those with an “insufficient” contrast ratio.

Happy to see I’m not the only one. This has been bugging me for a long time, how an “accessibility guidance” formula actually had the opposite effect. Why was that standardized?

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It’s a little sad the most widely used algorithms/guidance for contrast accessibility do not have peer reviewed evidence behind them. This goes for 2.1 and the upcoming standard. For something so impactful, I wish the industry help sponsor rigor here.

It’s not true, this is a meme that started around 2020 and color suffers the more for it.

It’s funny, in a sad way, when you dig into it. The ‘scientific’ version is about 5 lightness points different from WCAG, on a scale of 100. That isn’t a coincidence. put somewhat more directly, it sure is funny these people made up contrast ratio out of thin air without evidence, and the answer that will save us has basically the same #s

WCAG 2.x was neither peer reviewed nor empirically tested—true. However this is not the case for the candidate for WCAG 3, which is APCA. APCA has been in public beta testing for two and a half years, is the subject of ongoing empirical studies, and does already have journal published peer review, as well as independent peer reviews by PhDs, vision scientists, data scientists, and other technologists.

See a partial listing of reviews: https://git.apcacontrast.com/documentation/independent-revie...

IIRC there is movment within W3/WCAG to change the formula for judging contrast/ Or maybe it was just being called for and there's been no official pick up yet.

It's mentioned in the article as WCAG 3, APCA algorithm. The most important improvement in APCA is an exponent term.

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