A11y for Web Designers #1: Contrast

No, I don’t test for contrast. I design things to look great on my screen and pretty good on my client’s screen. Everyone else can fend for themselves. It’s hard enough to provide design services in a capitalist economy without being forced (or even expected) to accommodate every bleary-eyed, weak-wristed, hearing-impaired, broken-hipped, club-footed, cleft-palated, color blind, lisping, limping, anxious, malnourished, vitamin-deficient, uninformed, undereducated, and just plain idiotic user that may be unfortunate enough to stumble upon one of my sites.

Every designer has a certain bell curve in mind (whether they know it or not) when it comes to accessibility. But the bell curve’s cutoff point is decided upon individually by each designer. How many types of color blindness are you willing to accommodate? All of them (you’ll be using black and white)? The three most common types (in which you’re being unfair to the others)? Who bothers to check their sites in a screen reader? I don’t care, and clients don’t understand why it’s important. In ten years of doing web design and development I have never heard a single complaint, either from a user via a client, or directly via a user, about a color palette being unreadable by someone who was colorblind or had deteriorated vision. Maybe a few request to enlarge the font size, but when I explained that they could already do that with their browser, they were pleased.

My point is that this kind of socialist (or “universal” if you prefer) approach to design is perhaps worthy of striving for, but it’s also utopian. If you’re designing websites for government agencies, then sure, you have good reason to try and accommodate every possible problem that people might have. But the vast majority of people are designing sites for commercial entities. And commercial entities have budgets. I’d rather provide a more attractive and usable design to the 95% that can see, hear, and read just fine, instead of using the budget to run a bunch of obscure accessibility tests that the client isn’t wiling to pay for and that only 0.03% of site visitors will ever be aware of.