"High-contrast" mode

[jrubenoff]

When I go to customer on-on-sites (DOJ in particular, but also other enterprises from past jobs), washed-out monitors are common, and washed-out projectors are commonplace.

Especially in the case of projectors, users don't want to fiddle with their display settings to improve visibility. Or they don't know how, or their IT admin won't let them.

It would be nice if we had a higher-contrast stylesheet that customers with less fortunate hardware choices could take advantage of.

During my DOJ visit, I noticed that anything lighter than $darkerGray was invisible. It would be cool if we could automatically:

• Set every color: property to $darkestGray (or keep them at $black, if applicable).
• Set all other color styles (like background and border colors) lighter than $darkerGray to $darkerGray

[ajb]

Hmm. Isn't one of the benefits of adhering to WCAG contrast guidelines that we don't have to do this?

Can you link to me to any reading on this subject? This seems like a wacky solution, but maybe I'm not aware of how commonplace it is?

[jrubenoff]

Adhering to WCAG guidelines just keeps everything legible. This is about ensuring a great experience and keeping the interface clear, beyond just legibility, in terrible conditions.

Another alternative is to add more whitespace and titling throughout our UI, so that borders and shapes aren't necessary to distinguish between UI elements.

Here is a post from Salesforce that sort of alludes to the issue.

[ajb]

This is one of those things that if it was me suggesting it, I would expect your response to be something like:

• We should have enough contrast by default, so that users with inferior hardware don't have to know about a special toggle for them
• Even if we add a special toggle, we can't expect many of our users to find it

I read the Salesforce post, but it stills seems pretty wacky to have a special "high-contrast" mode for these users.

Maybe we should pick up an old monitor from Craigslist, and bring it to our new office so that we can test our designs in a "real-world government IT" scenario? 😁 (Not a joke!)

[jrubenoff]

When I suggest we simplify, I'm relying on the fact that we know most human brains can only hold so much complexity in our heads. UI best practices work because human cognition and psychology are fairly predictable.

By contrast, we can't predict a user's physical abilities or technology of choice (especially on the web!) And from that perspective, a "one size fits all" approach doesn't really work. You wouldn't design a building where everyone must take a long wheelchair ramp instead of a short flight of stairs. Instead, you make sure to accommodate differently-abled people with what works best for them.

In this instance, displaying higher contrast to every monitor would actually be super distracting to users on normal screens, making it harder for them to distinguish information from decoration.

I don't know if this specific idea is 💯, but in principle I think we should get more comfortable with the idea of letting users adjust our UI for ease of access.

[jrubenoff]

Also, I like the "old monitor" idea! I've been meaning to test Screendoor at an open device lab in SF, but I don't think they'll have old PCs, or old projectors...

[ajb]

In person:

• Josh: People with old equipment might not realize that they need higher contrast; might not know where the OS settings are to increase contrast
• Adam: I think this is the wrong area of the stack to implement contrast settings