I have difficulties reading yellow player names, and yellow ranks in the open challenges are straight up impossible to read without selecting the text to change the contrast.
The color theme needs an overhaul. Colour contrast for text - ADG
1 Like
As a workaround maybe try dark mode?
Also @Eugene is working on some accessibility themes maybe this fits into that project
3 Likes
Looks great in dark mode 
stop burning your eyes out and trade up 
3 Likes
As you can imagine, lots of effort has gone into getting where we are today.
There are many considerations. In respect of player names, there are at least 10 different “types” to accommodate with colours.
I’m sorry that you find it impossible to read. It’s always difficult to be the person that has trouble with something that works for most other people.
Your options are:
- Dark mode, as suggested above
- An accessible them is also hopefully soon to be deployed (though it doesn’t immediately address player name colours, but I’m open to suggestions)
- Undertake the upgrade of colour theme yourself: it’s really very easy - the easiest code you can do.
- Most of the colours are in ogs.styl.
- The fastest way to get it changed is to submit a PR with your changes, and screenshots of those
- You can also make changes directly in your browser, modifying your CSS locally
* If you do that, and find something that works, you can suggest it here, with screenshots. That still requires someone else to like it and do the PR.
What definitely will not work is saying “this sucks, do something”.
3 Likes
Would it make sense to eliminate the special colors in accessibility mode? Or maybe a separate setting for that? Not trying to pile on to your workload, just wondering if there’s a solution to this. It’s not the first time someone has complained about the special username colors.
1 Like
i pointed out a very obvious accessibility issue, and your official answer is “we don’t give a F unless you write the entire code for us” ?
this is even worse than your way of handling botter reports (“it’ only a bot if they play 100% same moves as my exact number of playouts and network”). seriously, why are you still on this mod team?
@awaytoplay come on man. The mods (and many developers) are volunteers. Don’t be like that.
4 Likes
Yes - I think it would make a lot of sense and is of course trivial to eliminate the special player colour names in accessible mode.
I guess it’s something we’d better get input on from affected people - maybe finding super-contrasting colours would be preferrable, even if those don’t look “great” to unaffected people.
For example, the reason that subscribers are gold is because they are special. Gold is the troublesome colour on a light background (and the difficulty is multiplied many times by the fact that it also appears on grey in the player name box in the game page). So far, the priority has been “keep it a special colour (gold) and make it as good as possible”.
For folk with accessibility issues, gold might not even be a meaningful thing.
1 Like
Of course we care about accessibility issues. At this very moment, in a thread nearby, a lot of effort -primarily from me at it happens, but well supported by others - has gone into creating an accessible theme to help with exactly this sort of problem.
But how did you go about pointing out the issue that you personally have in this area?
Have you considered that your initial post is a direct attack on my work?
I think I responded quite calmly, all things considered.
I’m still on the mod team because I contribute a lot, and I have a calm and reasonable approach to all problems (well, most of the time anyhow 
)
I suspect that your lack of satisfaction with reporting botters is probably down to a similar reason as your initial lack of success with getting the gold colour changed: your sef-righteous sense of entitlement and demanding approach to issues.
The ironic thing about this botter report complaint is that at present I’m the only person on the moderating team routinely tackling botters, because I care about that too. This is probably another reason I’m “still on the team” - because I am prepared to do that extremely timeconsuming and challenging work.
And all the time putting up which people like you complaining about it.
Fortunately there are far more people appreciating the work being done, so we can live with the complaints - obviously we can’t please everyone.
13 Likes
I’m happy with the text as it is. But anyway: movie subtitles overcome the readability issue by always having bright text with cartoonish black outline. Example:
The easiest one-liner CSS solution is to use text-shadow. It looks blurry and crap but does fix the readability. To get a visually pleasing sharp outline you need a more elaborate hack (8 drop shadows each offset in a different direction??!)
3 Likes
contrast checker for the current subscriber color. WebAIM: Contrast Checker
the contrast ratio is way below the minimum recommendation. on my slightly tilted laptop screen the gold turns into a bright yellow which makes the ratio subjectively even lower.
The problem is the tradeoff between “looks good” and “is accessible”, as you rightly observe here.
And of course, we’d really like to achieve a theme that “looks good and is accessible”, so we don’t have to have a separate accessible theme.
At the moment the discussion is around “will we be able to make the normal themes accessible and look good, or will we inevitably need a separate theme for really good accessibility”?
I’m keen to get input on this question. For example, if we are going to have to resort to text shadow, then that’d be a separate theme, I think, because it’s not “good enough” for our normal theme.
However, @flovo has pointed out that clever colour choice is possible to get accessibility via differing grey levels of each colour.
Based on the previous round of work I did on these colours, the real challenge lies in the player boxes on the Game page.
If it were not for these darn boxes, then contrasting colours would be significantly easier. However, these boxes have greyscale ranges across them, which makes finding a colour that works both on black’s set of greys and white’s set of greys extremely hard:
See how the “gold” in the theme has to survive on both a dark and a light grey - this “player box” design, which beautifully shows the colour of each player in a greyscale box, is the perfect storm for accessibility … it makes “do accessibility based on greyscale” incredibly challenging … it’s not clear to me if that will be possible.
(I already tweaked the greyscale background of those boxes to make it so that they are as close to black or white as possible by the time you hit the name… but whatever you do, the text colour has to work against both a dark and a bright background).
And you have to be able to do this for both the light and dark theme versions of these boxes.
Of course, we could redesign the boxes themselves, if that would help. Changing the look of the page itself is not a minor job though … it took ages of work and review and discussion to arrive at the current ones.
In the feedback description…
8 Likes
Flat design has been in vogue for years now… maybe an excuse to ditch the gradient?
Unfortunately it doesn’t really help the issue at hand, which is that there is no shade of gold which looks nice and gives a good contrast with both black and white (at least according to OP’s website)… here’s a demo of the lightest “gold” that checks all the accessibility boxes on an #eee background.
This is, of course, a point in favor of having a separate accessibility mode.
If I could offer one more option (either for accessibility mode or for the main site), it might make sense to have shape indicators for special status. For mods, a hammer. For site supporters, a star? Seems to work well for Lichess:
4 Likes
Or maybe one of these little critters:
3 Likes
Shape indicators do not help solving the contrast problem for black and white on the game page.
My proposal is to lose the problematic color indicators in favor of shapes/badges…
2 Likes
You’ll have to pry my purple mod name from my cold, dead hands 
4 Likes
Heh was purple problematic too? In that case, how cold and dead do your hands need to be in order to pry purple out of Accessibility mode? 