toolness / accessible-color-matrix Goto Github PK

Because the color matrix came out of the 18F branding guide, it was designed to show readers a finished palette; it wasn't made for designers who are in the process of creating a palette to make it usable.

So e.g. if a color combination is really close to being accessible, but not quite, we're not currently communicating that at all--we just gray out the box in the grid because it's not accessible. Hovering over the square does show the exact color contrast, but it's not very discoverable, nor easy to see at a glance.

So it might be better, at least when the user is in the "Edit" mode, to show the actual contrast ratios more prominently.

First off, great job on this project. I just learned about it today and I've added it to my design toolbox and shared it with the rest of my team. One thing that I noticed is the use of the very light image for the "Don't use" values. Even though I don't have a problem with contrast, it's possible that you'll have someone who does who would like to use your tool. I would suggest using an image that is more noticeable to convey those color combos that aren't compliant.

Keeping with the clean approach to your design, please consider my proposed update to the UI.

Thanks and have a good one.

After reading the Anatomy of a Typeface lesson in Better Web Typography, I noticed that the author talks about how different fonts have different levels of contrast:

Figure 19: Contrast is also a major contributing factor to how “heavy” a typeface looks like. Merriweather is a low-contrast typeface, while Bodoni is a high-contrast one. Take a closer look at each letter strokes. The difference is obvious.

I wonder if it'd be useful to take this into account somehow in the palette builder.

For instance, in the "type specimens" in the color matrix, might it be useful to allow the user to choose a typeface to use, so that they can see what it looks like in given color combinations.

Thoughts @ericronne?

Add colourblindness checking for the 4 red-green and 2 blue-yellow types.

Currently the tool only cares if the contrast ratio is 4.5 or not, which is WCAG AA, but WCAG AAA specifies a ratio of 7:1.

Since this seems like something that is decided once (e.g. at an organizational level) rather than used for individual design decisions, it might be appropriate to have it be a selector/checkbox of some sort.

License for this, or maybe I'm missing it?

A number of modules have attribute helpers for ARIA attributes and roles, which don't seem to be included in Elm's Html.Attributes module. We should move these out into a separate A11y module.

There is some kind of format called .clr that tools like Adobe and Sketch use; we should totes support it!

Lots of deprecated packages and final warning of webpack-dev-server: command not found

It'd be nice if we could show color suggestions, to allow the palette to be "tweaked" to be more accessible.

This is pretty open-ended. Ideas include:

• Being able to "lock" certain colors from being auto-tweaked.
• Showing designers a list of more accessible choices, so that they can pick one that looks the most aesthetically pleasing.

We could potentially look at a similar feature in the Chrome Accessibility Developer Tools (and even borrow it, since it seems to be open-source).

In the mobile responsive view, only the accessible color combinations are shown, so it looks confusing if there aren't any.

Great tool! Thank you for your contribution.

Problem
I am however having a caching issue on macOS using Goolge Chrome.

When I enter values, the values remain and I am unable to either reset to the original values or refresh my browser cache to get back to the default values.

macOS High Sierra: Version 10.13.6 (17G65)
Google Chrome: Version 67.0.3396.99 (Official Build) (64-bit)

Solution
Reset button that flushes the cache

Visual designers mentioned that the default jscolor picker's "rainbow" panel isn't very useful because it's not terribly precise. A Hue-Saturation-Brightness picker would be much more useful.

Currently we show whether a color combination has a contrast ratio of 4.5:1, which is the WCAG AA criterion for text. However, WCAG AA also specifies that "Large-scale text and images of large-scale text have a contrast ratio of at least 3:1", so it'd be nice if we could show that a color combination meets that lower-level requirement.