It brought into doubt everything the presenter said about the product having been quality assured with accessibility in mind. For product owners and buyers, learning about contrast can be a good way to become a smarter customer – a simple way to kick the tyres of a product. /END

Yes to all this! We recently made our website more accessible by adjusting the colour scheme for contrast and as a bonus it’s so much more relaxing to look at for people like us as well!

Great advice. I was asked to review sample pages a prospective vendor of advocacy tools put together (think write to your senator), and I couldn’t get past numerous accessibility issues including contrast and auto-playing, un-pauseable full-page video backgrounds. Not feeling great about this one!

It does depend on viewable range/distance tho. A product which is designed to be held or seen at close range (say <1m) can use weaker contrast than something that is to viewed at longer range, like a projected image in a conference hall.