Open tombye opened 2 years ago
Same issue was reported in another DAC audit recently (from the same auditor). See https://govuk.zendesk.com/agent/tickets/5116114.
One thing we could explore would be to disable -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased
and -moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale
at least for the normal weight text, which does have the effect of slightly increasing the weight / visual contrast of the text.
I think we might want to keep antialiasing enabled for white text on dark backgrounds and for bold text (which to my eye looks better with it on).
We'd also need to test across different browsers / OSes and on non-retina displays to fully understand the impact.
Example | -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased |
-webkit-font-smoothing: auto |
---|---|---|
Homepage | ||
Announcement |
Related links:
Could be done as part of the ongoing type scale work https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-design-system/issues/2289
We've had a complaint from a member of the public regarding the contrast of the font:
I am visually impaired and have some difficulty reading your website. The contrast is not so clear. If you were able to use deep black, as opposed to grey, which is very popular, it will always help visually impaired people greatly.
Description of the issue
The New Transport font, now used across www.gov.uk and any site on the
.service.gov.uk
domain, can be hard to read for vision impaired users. Those affected have to use custom stylesheets or forced colour modes (Windows High Contrast Mode or changing colours in Firefox) to achieve a high enough contrast.This was reported by the 'Low vision' tester at the Digital Accessibility Centre (DAC), in an audit commissioned by GOV.UK Notify.
Their comment was:
I can share the full audit and contact details for DAC if required.
Steps to reproduce the issue
Because the issue seems to occur for users with a visual impairment, I would guess that you would need to test with those types of users.
Actual vs expected behaviour
The tester expected to be able to read the text without issue but found problems related to how the design of the font interacted with their view of the web page.
Environment (where applicable)
GOV.UK Notify currently uses version 2.13.0 but the tester mentions experiencing this issue on the www.gov.uk website, so likely they were viewing pages using a more recent version.
The tester was using Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge on Windows (latest versions) for the audit but they mention experiencing this issue on mobile devices and other different screens. See their comment in the description for their exact words.