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Comment by refulgentis | Hacker News Reader

The article is wrong:

- Their work does ensure contrast.

- The white on blue clearly has less contrast, not more. (squinting is a cheap way to test, or, walking backwards from your monitor)

With APCA, backgrounds around L* 60 tend to still allow white foregrounds, which is aesthetically closer to what the eye wants.

A black foreground would have more contrast regardless, even by APCA.

To be fair, this is how APCA is almost always demonstrated as a win over the long-running standard, so people run with the premise that the demo image of APCA is more contrast, rather than "ours say you'll have enough contrast to be accessible with a white foreground, even if it also says the contrast would be higher with a black foreground".

(source: in 2020 built color system around the same science, enabling latest iterations of Material theming)

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> The white on blue clearly has less contrast, not more.

Is your screen really badly miscalibrated, or do you have some unusual vision condition? That’s all I can think of. I agree with the article, the white is very clearly higher contrast.

> A black foreground would have more contrast regardless, even by APCA.

OK, now I’m just baffled. The article shows the lightness contrasts for white and black on that particular blue: black gets Lᶜ 38.7, white gets Lᶜ −70.9. White foreground has more contrast, according to APCA.

I really am baffled by what you’re saying, because it all sounds coherent… except it’s all back to front.

The only explanation I can think of is that GP is, somewhat tautologically, defining contrast as "the value returned by WCAG 2's formula for computing contrast" (and, probably, assuming that WCAG 2's "science" has more basis in reality than it actually does).

I can't speak to Material You, but I've seen this sort of thinking at companies that are more concerned with legal compliance with the strict wording of WCAG 2, rather than on-the-ground user experience. People can even learn to ignore their lying eyes and fairly accurately guess what the WCAG 2 "contrast" metric for a given pair of colors will be, independently of how easy or hard the colors are to distinguish from one another.

Hopefully WCAG 3 will incorporate better color guidance from places like APCA, and at the very least these companies will stop producing unreadable black-foreground buttons and badges all the time.

Voters, I'd be very happy for feedback, I'm quite surprised it is -3.

EDIT:

I get it, it is easily read as "the entire article is wrong" instead of "the article is wrong on these points"

You're free to elaborate on your concerns. We could raise this to a conversation, I think that'll feel better for both of us than me taking that remark about me personally.

For example, I agree that the primary container color shouldn't have been L* 90 and used for buttons, and they shouldnt have severely limited chroma. In fact, I left over it and the dysfunction between VPs wondering why we didn't have it day 1, approving fixes repeatedly, and Android dysfunction that kept the conversation at "What? Didn't hear nothing from nobody in engineering! Anyways, lock screen clocks!"

I didn't vote, but "your article is wrong" take ignores literally the entire article, and the rather detailed explanation on why "bigger contrast by pure numbers is more contrast" does not work.

> in 2020 built color system around the same science, enabling latest iterations of Material theming

No wonder everything Google builds, including Material, always has issues with contrast.

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