Daily Sucker for Monday, May 26, 2009

Zen Habits(for those who don’t like to read and just want the link)

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Recently, a well-respected site for the web design community cited a number of sites for their wonderful design. One of these sites intrigued me, but it was a site for a web designer and I don’t critique these types of sites to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest. However…

…the image above is a full-size, high-resolution screenshot of some of the text (with most of the customer name redacted).

When I went to the site I was hoping for a religious experience and I was not disappointed. I started speaking in tongues. Unfortunately, the web site made me speak in Tourette tongues. Lack of contrast makes me unhappy and sets me off. Since it was the Memorial Day holiday, my wife was home and she was not amused.

Later in the day, I went to my RSS reader and saw that the Zen Habits blog was running a story called Would You Rather Be Right or Happy? It’s a great title so I clicked the link. As soon as I saw the text, I knew something was wrong — and my regular readers will know what I knew was wrong — the #3 Biggest Mistake in Web Design 1995-2015 — Contrast, Dammit. I went to the AccessColor web site to make sure I was right.

Of course, I was right — and that made me happy! Who says you have to choose between being right and being happy?

This screenshot shows you part of AccessColor’s report. Here are the important parts:

1. Both color difference and color brightness do not meet the recommended standard for 8.99% of the total text.
2. Either color difference or color brightness does not meet the recommended standard for 78.77% of the total.

Text on background with images is for 0.03% of the total text.

Zen Habits - Would You Rather Be Right or Happy?

Post from: Web Pages That Suck -- Daily Sucker