By: Laurie Weaver
Member Columnist
Have you been trying to work with Information Technology, but your initiatives and patience grind to a screeching halt? Do the terms they use sound like so much gobbledygook? Do you ever get the sneaking feeling that IT professionals just may, in fact, have come from Mars? If so, you've probably run headlong into some common "GeekSpeak" roadblocks. The aim of this ongoing column is to help forms professionals and technology professionals overcome roadblocks by gaining mutual understanding, vocabulary, and context. So if you need help with specifics, or if you'd just like to know more about a techie topic, email or post any and all questions to Ask Ms. GeekSpeak. This month's topic: "Online color accessibility."
Dear Ms. GeekSpeak, my Web developer doesn’t think I should use the same color palette my print designer came up with because of W3C accessibility. What does that mean?
Glad you asked that! Let’s start with the W3C. This is a GeekSpeak acronym that’s always useful to know when communicating with Web developers. It’s short for “World Wide Web Consortium” – note the 3 Ws prior to the C – hence W3C. The World Wide Web Consortium has been around since 1994. In their own words, it’s “an international consortium where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards.”
You may learn more about the W3C and its initiatives by checking out their extensive website at http://www.w3.org/
Prior to the W3C and the evolution of Web standards, the wild and woolly Internet used to be a tangle of technologies and workarounds cobbled together by hapless Web designers in pursuit of their clients’ sites “looking the same” on all Web browsers. “Looking the same” on all browsers can be very tricky (in fact impossible) because until recently most browsers displayed coded Web pages very differently from each other. This meant that a page that looked great on Internet Explorer might not look so nifty on Firefox or vice versa. It also meant Web developers and designers had to learn several tricks and shims to account for the way various browsers did things. Before the progress of Web standards, this was an inefficient and annoying state of affairs since the very tricks that worked previously may well be those that will break your site in the future!
OK, so now we know that Web standards have begun to tame browser behavior, but just how does that impact our designer’s choice of color? One of the primary tenets of Web standards is that information should be accessible to everyone. This includes folks (like Ms. GeekSpeak) who have difficulty seeing. One Web design guideline that is well known along that line is that one should add code that includes alternate text descriptions along with the images on the Web so that software used by the visually impaired to “read the screen” will know what the images are conveying. A lesser known, and even lesser employed, technique is to test for contrast between all fonts and background colors. One needn’t be legally blind to have a hard time reading colors that “blend together” online. This might also be the result of low lighting conditions, tired eyes, color blindness, or age-related conditions in which our eyes just don’t focus as well as they used to.
One way to test is to view all of your proposed online pages and images after setting the monitor to grayscale. It can really be surprising to see what is easily read or not. Another way to check out proposed color schemes is to try one of the online “color checkers.” This simple one developed by Canadian Web designer Jonathan Snook is one of my favorites.
http://www.snook.ca/technical/colour_contrast/colour.html
Play with it awhile. Don’t take its results as gospel, but it will give you the flavor of how “taupe text on a smoky blue background” just might not be such a great combo online.
In case this has really sparked your interest, check out this great article by Roger Johansson. In it, he gives a great overview of color contrast and provides a great list of resources for further color checking.
If you take the time to explore and apply the concept of accessible color contrast to all of your online tools, content, and form designs, more of your users will be able to see the information and directions you’ve so carefully crafted. Now if we could just get the users to actually read them! As always, if you’d like to know more about color, the W3C, Web standards, or any other “geeky” word or topic, post here, or email Ask Ms. GeekSpeak.
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