A few days ago I received an extremely rude comment. It was alluding to the choice of font color that I've selected to display code snippets on this blog. While trying to understand how I offended the poster, I realized that under some circumstances low contrast fonts can be extremely difficult to read. Interestingly apart from the rant, the poster's comment's only clear indication of the problem were the following three words: "... using gray font!!!"
I initially chose dark gray font as a way to differentiate between this blog's text and code snippets, or text as part of a file. I did a bit of research after reading his/her post, and found that low contrast fonts are not conducive to creating an accessible or easily readable website. NOTE: I did check the hexadecimal codes of the background and foregrounds against an WCAG 2.0 colour testing site, and found the the following:
My code foreground colour was gray #666666
The background colour is white #FFFFFF
The test was performed at:
http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/
The results from the test are as shown in the following screenshot:
Armed with this new knowledge, I will strive to write future posts in a more accessible format, while retaining the differentiation between plain text and code or configuration files. If I have the time, I will endeavor to update my previous posts to this format, though I will not make any promise as to when that might happen or even whether I do it at all.
If anyone has suggestions in terms of font size, style or anything else to help me achieve this goal, I would appreciate any comment.
I will not apologize to the individual who left the incredibly rude remark on this site if he or she was offended, but I will thank him or her for raising my attention to a potential problem. After all, that is the point of this blog: Finding solutions to problems.
A note on comments: I appreciate all comments, and I don't mind some level of rudeness, but seriously there are limits... For those of you who are very passionate and quick to anger, tone it down just a bit. I would hate to delete comments that may be valid, simply due to a seriously wrong remark.
Cheers!
I initially chose dark gray font as a way to differentiate between this blog's text and code snippets, or text as part of a file. I did a bit of research after reading his/her post, and found that low contrast fonts are not conducive to creating an accessible or easily readable website. NOTE: I did check the hexadecimal codes of the background and foregrounds against an WCAG 2.0 colour testing site, and found the the following:
My code foreground colour was gray #666666
The background colour is white #FFFFFF
The test was performed at:
http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/
The results from the test are as shown in the following screenshot:
 |
Armed with this new knowledge, I will strive to write future posts in a more accessible format, while retaining the differentiation between plain text and code or configuration files. If I have the time, I will endeavor to update my previous posts to this format, though I will not make any promise as to when that might happen or even whether I do it at all.
If anyone has suggestions in terms of font size, style or anything else to help me achieve this goal, I would appreciate any comment.
I will not apologize to the individual who left the incredibly rude remark on this site if he or she was offended, but I will thank him or her for raising my attention to a potential problem. After all, that is the point of this blog: Finding solutions to problems.
A note on comments: I appreciate all comments, and I don't mind some level of rudeness, but seriously there are limits... For those of you who are very passionate and quick to anger, tone it down just a bit. I would hate to delete comments that may be valid, simply due to a seriously wrong remark.
Cheers!
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