diff --git a/content/notes/accessibility-audits-and-forced-colors.md b/content/notes/accessibility-audits-and-forced-colors.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..2d3e28d --- /dev/null +++ b/content/notes/accessibility-audits-and-forced-colors.md @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +--- +title: "Accessibility audits and forced colors" +date: 2022-11-15T14:54:01-08:00 +replyURI: "https://adrianroselli.com/2022/11/your-accessibility-claims-are-wrong-unless.html" +replyTitle: "Your Accessibility Claims Are Wrong, Unless…" +replyType: "BlogPosting" +replyAuthor: "Adrian Rosell" +replyAuthorURI: "https://adrianroselli.com/" +--- +I love this blog post. Thank you for writing it. I must add one thing: every accessibility audit needs to **test with forced colors.** Countless sites claim to be accessible but fail this basic check. + +For those less familiar: forced colors is a standard feature [defined in the CSS Color Adjustment Module Level 1](https://w3c.github.io/csswg-drafts/css-color-adjust-1/#forced). It overrides colors with a user-preferred palette. Implementations include Windows High Contrast Mode and Firefox on all supported desktop platforms (I'm not sure about mobile). + +Forced colors reveals violations of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines level A [success criterion 1.4.1, Use of Color](https://w3c.github.io/wcag/understanding/use-of-color.html). I use forced colors in Firefox every day, and often face issues. For examples: see [Can I Use issue 6527](https://github.com/Fyrd/caniuse/issues/6527), or [this Kagi search feedback](https://kagifeedback.org/d/611-focus-indicators-are-invisible-when-using-forced-colors) + +[Section 2.3 of the CSS Color Adjustment Module](https://drafts.csswg.org/css-color-adjust/#color-scheme-override) leaves much room for non-standard user-agent-specific behavior beyond the standard forced colors. Chromium, mobile Firefox, and Samsung Internet have their own "auto dark modes" which intelligently and selectively adjust colors on light-themed websites. Testing on all these configurations is hard; forced colors is a simpler, predictable place to get started. +