Comment by chrismorgan
Comment by chrismorgan 16 hours ago
> The white on blue clearly has less contrast, not more.
Is your screen really badly miscalibrated, or do you have some unusual vision condition? That’s all I can think of. I agree with the article, the white is very clearly higher contrast.
> A black foreground would have more contrast regardless, even by APCA.
OK, now I’m just baffled. The article shows the lightness contrasts for white and black on that particular blue: black gets Lᶜ 38.7, white gets Lᶜ −70.9. White foreground has more contrast, according to APCA.
I really am baffled by what you’re saying, because it all sounds coherent… except it’s all back to front.
The only explanation I can think of is that GP is, somewhat tautologically, defining contrast as "the value returned by WCAG 2's formula for computing contrast" (and, probably, assuming that WCAG 2's "science" has more basis in reality than it actually does).
I can't speak to Material You, but I've seen this sort of thinking at companies that are more concerned with legal compliance with the strict wording of WCAG 2, rather than on-the-ground user experience. People can even learn to ignore their lying eyes and fairly accurately guess what the WCAG 2 "contrast" metric for a given pair of colors will be, independently of how easy or hard the colors are to distinguish from one another.
Hopefully WCAG 3 will incorporate better color guidance from places like APCA, and at the very least these companies will stop producing unreadable black-foreground buttons and badges all the time.