I appreciate that you've been reflecting on lessons from the last release, but I must admit I am concerned that you seem not to have mentioned what was the most serious problem for me, and I think for some others as well. My issue was that the new default view was virtually unusable due to the lack of contrast between text and background. This is rather more serious than simply not liking the new look, and as a user with bad eyes, I wasn't quite sure how to react when your release notes emphasized accessibility, but then the release itself was practically unreadable due to the text and background being different shades of the same color, which is - I'm sorry but - a rather basic fundamental accessibility error.
I don't want to come off as grudgy here, since I really did appreciate how quickly you acted on this, and I was under the impression that you did understand the problem, since you very quickly changed the default background to improve the contrast. But that only makes me even more bemused though that you make no mention of the accessibility issue in your reflections here. I'm not asking for self-flagellation or anything, but some acknowledgement that this is an area which needs closer attention - better testing, better research - in the future would have been reassuring and gone some way towards rebuilding some trust.
Apologies - that is something that we should have addressed explicitly here. The reason it was missed is because the contrast problem actually arose as a result of the other issues we discussed above - the testing and communications problems. The coder who did the redesign actually did an enormous amount of research and testing for accessibility, and as far as it was possible coded the site to conform to current accessibility standards. As part of that, she implemented a background colour which met current guidelines for default contrasts; however, a lot of our staff had aesthetic issues with it and it displayed very differently in different browsers. We had some miscommunication about the reasoning behind the actual choice and as a result of the other feedback we changed the background to the one we deployed. So, it wasn't that there was a lack of research or initial testing, but the other problems in our process meant that some of that was lost along the way. As you're probably aware, there's no way to guarantee that contrast - or anything else - is accessible for everyone, since both people and browsers vary so much, but what we deployed caused problems for a disproportionate amount of people. We know that the whiter background also causes some accessibility problems for some people, so we may change again in future if we can find a colour that will work better.
We're pretty devastated about this since the fundamental concept behind the redesign was that accessibility should be the default, not the special case (this has always been at the heart of our design philosophy, although in practice we haven't always had the levels of knowledge to make it work). As far as we know, there aren't any other aspects of the redesign which made the site less accessible (except in cases where a bug stopped the design working as it should) - if you do encounter problems then please do let us know about them.
If we keep up our current levels of research and fix all the other things we discussed in this post, then this is an area that should improve immeasurably. However, we definitely should have made this more explicit - apologies. We also welcome any input on how we could build accessible design more firmly into our processes.
Comment on Accessibility, Design and Technology Meeting - 3 December 2011
Crow Dog (Guest) Wed 28 Dec 2011 09:54PM UTC
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LucyP Wed 28 Dec 2011 10:42PM UTC
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