Category Archives: HTML

Your Website Needs Color and Contrast

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NOTE – I found this old blog post in my drafts, so I did some time editing it, link checking, etc., and hit publish of an old draft.

To Read Your Content

To allow people to read your content, you need to make sure to have the color contrast as high as possible. So people can read what you have written. It shouldn’t be so high that it bothers people with low vision. Were too much contrast makes it difficult for them to read.

Putting light text on pastel or light backgrounds is not good for some people. You also have to think about the different types of color deficiencies (colorblindness). Meaning you don’t want to have red text on a green background, etc.

A Useful Tool

Below are a few different tools I use to check color contrast. The color contrast tool I use the most is Jonathan Snook’s web-based “Colour Contrast Tool”.  It’s the tool I use to check color contrast for the development team at work or if I have chosen will work.

W3C Recommendation for Color Contrast

Here’s the W3C recommended values from the WCAG 2.0 – 1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum) Level AA.

Following these guidelines ensures that foreground and background color combinations provide enough contrast. This pertains to those with color deficiencies. To pass your text and background need to have a color contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 or higher to pass.

How High Should Your Color Contrast Be

You also have to think about how the web page or application is going to be used. Now, if it a heat index application that is likely going to be used outdoors. You have to consider most high heat index days will probably be in bright sunlight. So blaring sunny will not work well with a contrast ratio that passes b a little bit.

Color Deficiency or Colorblindness

Another tool is the “Color Oracle.” It’s used to simulate different types of colorblindness. They have Windows, Mac, and Linux versions created by Bernhard Jenny, Oregon State University (programming), Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso, and Stamen Design, San Francisco (ideas, testing, and icon).  The application places a color overlay for your entire main screen. You can set up different PF or function keys to turn on and off different types of colorblindness masks easily.

Doing this allows you to check against the three main types of color blindness. About 10% of the population is colorblind. Most of them are males. The three main types of color blindness are:

  • Deuteranopia or deuteranomaly (a form of red/green color deficit) – 7.5% of all males.
  • Protanopia or protanomaly (another form of red/green color deficit) – 2.5% of all males.
  • Tritanopia (a blue/yellow deficit- very rare) – Less than 0.3% of women and men.

More Tools

Next is the full list of tools I would you for building websites. Your choice will depend on how you work and what’s best for you.

I hope these tools are helpful to you in checking for color contrast issues.

Additional Reading

For a more detailed look at color contrast, you need to read Todd Libby’s color contrast article called “Contrasting Accessibility with Color Contrast“. You should also follow him on Twitter at @ToddLibby.

Any Recommendations

If you have any other tools that you use and think I should checkout, please leave a comment, and I will give them a look.

Playing Around with Flexbox by Starting with Articles and CodePen’s from Others

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About a week ago on January 13, 2019, I saw a tweet from Heydon Pickering  ( @heydonworks ) talking about how he was using Flexbox to switch directly between multiple and single column layouts but didn’t have time to read it at the time because I was at work.

Later that day I saw Jonathan Snook ( @snookca ) had tweeted about some tweaks he had made to Heydon’s CodePen example.

Here is Heydon’s “The Flexbox Holy Albatross” article which he didn’t want to use media queries or JavaScript, along with Jonathan’s article about Heydon’s “Understanding the Albatross” article. NOTE: I used media queries to change font sizes in my example.

Started to Play with Heydon’s Code

After reading through both articles, I started playing around with Heydon’s CodePen to see what would happen with only two blocks for my jfciii Ate Here restaurant list. After playing around for a bit, I grabbed the HTML and CSS I had messed with and copied it into Textmate to make one page using my template for jfciii Ate Here. At that point, I gathered a few restaurants from my list of place to eat in Washington, DC and replaced the blocks with real content to see what doing so would be like on the page.

Part of my picking certain restaurants was to gather ones with different lengths to content for the same row for a wide width screen (think desktop/laptop). At first, I started with two per restaurants to see what that looked like for desktop/laptop and different width between there and a narrow width for a phone.

To me, it seemed that having two items to a line/row seemed like it could be confusing when reading the content, But then I remembered that most of the time people would most likely checking for restaurants on their phones while they were out wandering a city or sitting with friends instead of a desktop or laptop.

Pushed My Code Example

After pushing the updates a few different times to my website, I asked a coworker what they thought about the two columns, and they thought maybe adding a bit of space between the two columns would make it easier to read.

I then spent some time working on my CSS to add a few REMs worth to the right of them which seemed to work. But then I had the problem of forgetting I had to only added it to the first item in the list for a widescreen device. I ended up using :nth-child(odd), so the extra padding was on the first item in the row. Next, I had to remove the extra padding when in a narrower view such as on my phone.

Then I decided to attempt to use three restaurants to a row for a few rows and then two for one, and one with only one restaurant to see how they all looked before updating my PHP code to generate a given amount to my application page.

When I did that, I then had to add a max-width to the restaurant content container, so it didn’t span the width of a row, so the reading experience was better for people because of the long line length.

So here is my experiment with a bit of flexbox for jfciii Ate Here and the current look of one restaurant at a time for the wider width.

Thanks, Guys

Thanks, again Heydon and Jonathan for your articles and examples to get me to play around with flexbox.

Further Reading and Video Watching

Now it’s off to spend time finishing up reading Rachel Andrew’s ( @rachelandrew ) book from A Book Apart “The New CSS Layout“. Then start reading Rachel and Jen Simmons ( @jensimmons ) other work and watching both of their amazing videos to understand CSS Grid better. See below for more of their work.

Rachel Andrew

Jen Simmons

Conclusion

Please leave a comment of which number of restaurants per row for wider screens you think works for ease of reading and compare against my current version of jfciii Ate Here.

Mobile Articles, Blog Posts, Resources, etc. from Work and Home Computer Bookmarks

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Two people over a week ago asked me for mobile resources one for checking accessibility on mobile devices and the other for general information, so I figured I would publish them for all to see. Here are a bunch of resources from my work bookmarks, along with even more from my home laptop. A bunch of these articles, blog post, etc. are five or six years old, but the ideas and concepts are still worth reading.

UPDATED broken and redirected links – 01/02/2017.

The information is grouped together by the organization or person that wrote them.

BBC Mobile

Henny Swan

Paul Adam – this mobile resources page has a lot of links on it

Marcy Sutton

Luke Wroblewski

Apple – iOS

Videos

Android

Brad Frost

Jason Grigsby

Brian Fling

SSB Bart Group

Rachel Andrew

PPK

jQuery

Miscellaneous Mobile Accessibility

Hopefully, some or all these were helpful to you.

Test HTML and CSS Based Organizational Charts

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I was playing around a few months go create the best way to build an organizational chart that are accessible and thought it was time to publish this blog post. So I created what I’m hoping is an accessible organizational charts page. The charts are text based, and I hope they make sense visually as well to assistive technology users like screen readers.

The first chart is built using nested definition lists (DL), which are styled with CSS to show visually which groups or people fall under other groups or people. The second example organizational chart is built using structured headings. These were indented by adding CSS classes to make them easier to read and understand the organizational hierarchy visually.

I’m hoping creating organizational charts one of these ways work. I’m thinking by making organizational charts this way might not work out well if you have a large organization, but could be useful to smaller teams or companies.

If you use assistive technology can you please tell me if these organizational charts are helpful in conveying an organization’s structure.

Simple Accessibility Updates to Improve New York Times New Redesign – Part 1

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From the promo piece I saw about the New York Times new redesign, everything looked really good, and I was looking forward to seeing it.

New York Times Redesign Goes Live

On Wednesday (January 8, 2014), the new New York Times redesign went live, and everyone was raving how lovely it was from a design, content, and responsive web design perspective. No one was talking about how accessible the new redesign was. On Wednesday morning, I saw Patrick Dunphy’s tweet: “redesigned http://nytimes.com homepage #accessibility quick check w/@WebAIM tools web 59 & toolbar 131 errors #a11y” I’m familiar with the WAVE Toolbar by WebAIM, which is useful for testing behind firewalls or for code found on DEV servers. It’s a free Firefox plug-in and WebAIM’s online checker is useful as well. After seeing that Patrick had run the home page through the WAVE tools, I had to do the same thing myself. And I found that the New York Times had missed a lot of what I thought were easy items, such as missing ALT text, empty or missing headings, missing form LABELs, etc. I was able to confirm Patrick’s findings. On Saturday evening at about 6:30 PM EST with the WebAIM WAVE toolbar, I found 115 errors. The following screenshot shows the results. Some of the problems that the tool identified are:

  • Missing ALT text – red background with white line running through it diagonally
  • Linked image missing ALT text – white hand on the red background
  • Empty heading – an “H” with a question mark on a red background

All screenshots can be enlarged by clicking the images and they were re-taken on January, 27, 2014.WebAIM WAVE toolbar with 115 errors Next, I used the WAVE WebAIM accessibility checker and I found 57 errors and 89 warnings. The following screenshot shows the problems that the tool identified:

Errors

  • Missing ALT text – red background with white line running through it diagonally
  • Linked image missing ALT text – white hand on the red background
  • Empty heading – an H with a question mark (h?) on a red background
  • Missing FORM LABEL – white gift tag on red background
  • Image button missing ALT text

Warnings

  • Missing first level heading – yellow background with an “H1”
  • Noscript element – paper scroll on yellow background
  • Long ALT text – the word “long ALT” on yellow background

WebAIM WAVE accessibility checker showing 57 errors and 89 warnings Around 2 PM EST Wednesday afternoon, I saw Jeffrey Zeldman’s tweet: “NYTimes redesign has finally gone public. http://www.nytimes.com/redesign/ Content-first, responsive, immersive.” I replied: “hopefully accessibility next? Missing easy stuff? MT @zeldman NYTimes redesign has finally gone public. Content-first, responsive, immersive” And Jeffrey answered: “@jfc3 Can you write a post about the easy things, accessibility-wise, that the otherwise wonderful @nytimes redesign is missing?” So I responded: “sure @zeldman I can write up a blog post over weekend about the easy accessibility updates the new @nytimes redesign should have done. #a11y”

Writing an Accessibility Review

My conversation with Jeffrey is why I wrote this blog post after checking the New York Times new redesign for simple accessibility issues. I understand that not all of the home page may have been updated, or parts of the page are being created somewhere else or that they have a bunch of technical debt they have to deal with. I’m trying to use this large public project to show people that, in the real world not everything gets done before you go live. But you still can work on accessibility at any time with some easy-to-use free tools that will get your website or web application closer to being accessible to all. After you fix the issues found with the free tools, you start to worry about using assistive technologies like screen readers (JAWS, NDVA, VoiceOver, etc.), talk-to-type (Dragon Naturally Speaking), text enlargers (ZoomText), etc.

Possible Solutions

The New York Times can make some simple changes to the home page and article pages (future blog post) to make them more accessible to those using assistive technologies or those who only use the keyboard.

Missing ALT Text

Let’s start with the missing ALT text, which seems to be common in certain sections of the home page, but not in others. If you go to the “Inside NYTimes.com” section, they use the article title as the ALT text, a technique I used to have our developers use for images that link to articles on ARMY.MIL. Missing ALT text for the previous or next buttons in the “Inside NYTimes.com” section In the “Inside NYTimes.com” section, there are no ALT text for the previous or next buttons, which you would think would be useful for those trying to see other items currently listed off screen. When you go to the sections shown below, which are the World, Business Day, Opinion, Technology, etc., there is no ALT text. Look for the white hand on the red background to see which linked images are missing ALT text. Missing ALT text for the images that link to the articles Here is another section (“The Opinion Pages”) of the home page that is missing ALT text, which are links to the articles. Opinion page section with empty ALT text for images that link to same place as the heading level five’s (h5) I’m not sure why they didn’t make the ALT text be the article title as they did in “Inside NYTimes.com” section for the “World, Business Day, Opinion, Technology, etc.” section and the “The Opinion Pages” section.

Empty or Missing Headings Levels

After running both WebAIM tools (WAVE toolbar and online checker), I noticed that the home page had a bunch of headings that were empty. Most of the time, that was because they had created the same heading level just before or after the empty one. Under the main featured article, there is an empty heading level six (H6), which is followed by a heading level five (H5), and then another heading level six (H6). Why not remove the empty heading level six (H6), because it’s making it more difficult for those using screen readers, etc. to understand the page structure and find things on the page? Under the “Arts” section (as mentioned by Sarah Bourne), there is a heading level four (H4), and then there is an empty heading level six (H6) followed by a heading level five (H5). This shows issues with headings because one is empty and another that it is not in proper order, because it goes from H4 to H6 to H5. Empty heading level six (H6) under feature article and incorrect heading order under “Business Day section”

Missing Form LABELs

When you look under the “Auto” and Jobs” tabs of the home page, there are form INPUT fields with missing LABELs. Another interesting part of this is that the text above the INPUT fields is outside the FORM itself. Missing LABELS in Auto Section of New York Times Home Page   The New York Times newly redesigned home page still has some other issues: possible color contrast problems, buttons that are not real buttons (as mentioned by Ian Pouncey), issues with using the keyboard, and screen readers that can’t figure out where a person is on the screen, etc.

Conclusion

I’m going to break this topic into multiple parts. I plan to write about the other accessibility issues found on the home page, about the article pages, which I’m guessing will have similar issues as the home page does, and finally how to use all the tools I used. I hope this post helps you find easy ways to check your websites quickly for accessibility issues, along with pointing out a few free tools you can use. If you have other tools or software that you use to check website accessibility, please add them in the comments, because not all tools will find all the issues.

References

WebAIM

Edited by: Char James-Tanny of JTF Associates, Inc. – @CharJTF