Tags: colour

I was doing some accessibility work with a client a little while back. It was mostly giving their site the once-over, highlighting any issues that we could then discuss. It was an audit of sorts.

While I was doing this I started to realise that not all accessibility issues are created equal. I don’t just mean in their severity. I mean that some issues can—and should—be caught early on, while other issues can only be found later.

Take colour contrast. This is something that should be checked before a line of code is written. When designs are being sketched out and then refined in a graphical editor like Figma, that’s the time to check the ratio between background and foreground colours to make sure there’s enough contrast between them. You can catch this kind of thing later on, but by then it’s likely to come with a higher cost—you might have to literally go back to the drawing board. It’s better to find the issue when you’re at the drawing board the first time.

Then there’s the HTML. Most accessibility issues here can be caught before the site goes live. Usually they’re issues of ommission: form fields that don’t have an explicitly associated label element (using the for and id attributes); images that don’t have alt text; pages that don’t have sensible heading levels or landmark regions like main and nav. None of these are particularly onerous to fix and they come with the biggest bang for your buck. If you’ve got sensible forms, sensible headings, alt text on images, and a solid document structure, you’ve already covered the vast majority of accessibility issues with very little overhead. Some of these checks can also be automated: alt text for images; labels for inputs.

Then there’s interactive stuff. If you only use native HTML elements you’re probably in the clear, but chances are you’ve got some bespoke interactivity on your site: a carousel; a mega dropdown for navigation; a tabbed interface. HTML doesn’t give you any of those out of the box so you’d need to make your own using a combination of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and ARIA. There’s plenty of testing you can do before launching—I always ask myself “What would Heydon do?”—but these components really benefit from being tested by real screen reader users.

So if you commission an accessibility audit, you should hope to get feedback that’s mostly in that third category—interactive widgets.

If you get feedback on document structure and other semantic issues with the HTML, you should fix those issues, sure, but you should also see what you can do to stop those issues going live again in the future. Perhaps you can add some steps in the build process. Or maybe it’s more about making sure the devs are aware of these low-hanging fruit. Or perhaps there’s a framework or content management system that’s stopping you from improving your HTML. Then you need to execute a plan for ditching that software.

If you get feedback about colour contrast issues, just fixing the immediate problem isn’t going to address the underlying issue. There’s a process problem, or perhaps a communication issue. In that case, don’t look for a technical solution. A design system, for example, will not magically fix a workflow issue or route around the problem of designers and developers not talking to each other.

When you commission an accessibility audit, you want to make sure you’re getting the most out of it. Don’t squander it on issues that you can catch and fix yourself. Make sure that the bulk of the audit is being spent on the specific issues that are unique to your site.

I added a dark mode to my site last year. Since then I’ve been idly toying with the addition of a dark mode to The Session too.

As with this site, the key to adding a dark mode was switching to custom properties for color and background-color declarations. But my plans kept getting derailed by the sheet music on the site. The sheet music is delivered as SVG generated by ABCJS which hard-codes the colour in stroke and fill attributes:

fill="#000000" stroke="#000000"

When I was describing CSS recently I mentioned the high specifity of inline styles:

Whereas external CSS and embedded CSS don’t have any effect on specificity, inline styles are positively radioactive with specificity.

Given that harsh fact of life, I figured it would be nigh-on impossible to over-ride the colour of the sheetmusic. But then I realised I was an idiot.

The stroke and fill attributes in SVG are presentational but they aren’t inline styles. They’re attributes. They have no affect on specifity. I can easily over-ride them in an external style sheet.

In fact, if I had actually remembered what I wrote when I was adding a dark mode to adactio.com, I could’ve saved myself some time:

I have SVGs of sparklines on my homepage. The SVG has a hard-coded colour value in the stroke attribute of the path element that draws the sparkline. Fortunately, this can be over-ridden in the style sheet:

svg.activity-sparkline path {
  stroke: var(--text-color);
}

I was able to do something similar on The Session. I used the handy currentColor keyword in CSS so that the sheet music matched the colour of the text:

svg path {
  fill: currentColor;
}
svg path:not(stroke="none") {
  stroke: currentColor;
}

Et voila! I now had light-on-dark sheet music for The Session’s dark mode all wrapped up in a prefers-color-scheme: dark media query.

I pushed out out the new feature and started getting feedback. It could be best summarised as “Thanks. I hate it.”

It turns out that while people were perfectly fine with a dark mode that inverts the colours of text, it felt really weird and icky to do the same with sheet music.

On the one hand, this seems odd. After all, sheet music is a writing system like any other. If you’re fine with light text on a dark background, why doesn’t that hold for light sheet music on a dark background?

But on the other hand, sheet music is also like an image. And we don’t invert the colours of our images when we add a dark mode to our CSS.

With that in mind, I went back to the drawing board and this time treated the sheet music SVGs as being intrinsicly dark-on-light, rather than a stylistic choice. It meant a few more CSS rules, but I’m happy with the final result. You can see it in action by visiting a tune page and toggling your device’s “appearance” settings between light and dark.

If you’re a member of The Session, I also added a toggle switch to your member profile so you can choose dark or light mode regardless of your device settings.

I added a dark mode to my website a while back. It was a fun thing to do during Indie Web Camp Amsterdam last year.

I tied the colour scheme to the operating system level. If you choose a dark mode in your OS, my website will adjust automatically thanks to the prefers-color-scheme: dark media query.

But I’ve seen notes from a few friends, not about my site specifically, but about how they like having an explicit toggle for dark mode (as well as the media query). Whenever I read those remarks, I’d think “I’m really not sure I’ve got time to deal with adding that kind of toggle to my site.”

But then I realised, “Jeremy, you absolute muffin! You’ve had a theme switcher on your website for almost two decades now!”

Doh! I had forgotten about that theme switcher. It dates back to the early days of CSS. I wanted my site to be a demonstration of how you could apply different styles to the same underlying markup (this was before the CSS Zen Garden came along). Those themes are very dated now, but if you like you can view my site with a Zeldman theme or a sci-fi theme.

To offer a dark-mode theme for my site, all I had to do was take the default stylesheet, pull out the custom properties from the prefers-color-scheme: dark media query, and done. It took less than five minutes.

So if you want to view my site in dark mode, it’s one of the options in the “Customise” dropdown on every page of the website.

I wrote recently about moving away from Sass to using native CSS features. I had this to say on the topic of mixins in Sass:

These can be very useful, but now there’s a lot that you can do just in CSS with calc(). The built-in darken() and lighten() mixins are handy though when it comes to colours.

I know we will be getting these in the future but we’re not there yet with CSS.

Anyway, I had all this in the back of my mind when I was reading Lea’s excellent feature in this month’s Increment: A user’s guide to CSS variables. She’s written about a really clever technique of combining custom properites with hsl() colour values for creating colour palettes. (See also: Una’s post on dynamic colour theming with pure CSS.)

As so often happens when I’m reading something written by Lea—or seeing her give a talk—light bulbs started popping over my head (my usual response to Lea’s knowledge bombs is either “I didn’t know you could do that!” or “I never thought of doing that!”).

I immediately set about implementing this technique over on The Session. The trick here is to use separate custom properties for the hue, saturation, and lightness parts of hsl() colour values. Then, when you want to lighten or darken the colour—say, on hover—you can update the lightness part.

I’ve made a Codepen to show what I’m doing.

Let’s say I’m styling a button element. I make custom propertes for hsl() values:

button {
  --button-colour-hue: 19;
  --button-colour-saturation: 82%;
  --button-colour-lightness: 38%;
  background-color: hsl(
    var(--button-colour-hue),
    var(--button-colour-saturation),
    var(--button-colour-lightness)
  );
}

For my buttons, I want the borders to be slightly darker than the background colour. When I was using Sass, I used the darken() function to this. Now I use calc(). Here’s how I make the borders 10% darker:

border-color: hsl(
  var(--button-colour-hue),
  var(--button-colour-saturation),
  calc(var(--button-colour-lightness) - 10%)
);

That calc() function is substracting a percentage from a percentage: 38% minus 10% in this case. The borders will have a lightness of 28%.

I make the bottom border even darker and the top border lighter to give a feeling of depth.

button

On The Session there’s a “cancel” button style that’s deep red.

cancel

Here’s how I set its colour:

.cancel {
  --button-colour-hue: 0;
  --button-colour-saturation: 100%;
  --button-colour-lightness: 40%;
}

That’s it. The existing button declarations take care of assigning the right shades for the border colours.

Here’s another example. Site admins see buttons for some actions only available to them. I want those buttons to have their own colour:

.admin {
  --button-colour-hue: 45;
  --button-colour-saturation: 100%;
  --button-colour-lightness: 40%;
}

admin

You get the idea. It doesn’t matter how many differently-coloured buttons I create, the effect of darkening or lightening their borders is all taken care of.

So it turns out that the lighten() and darken() functions from Sass are available to us in CSS by using a combination of custom properties, hsl(), and calc().

I’m also using this combination to lighten or darken background and border colours on :hover. You can poke around the Codepen if you want to see that in action.

I love seeing the combinatorial power of these different bits of CSS coming together. It really is a remarkably powerful programming language.