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.