1548316 - Colors for "Full support" and "Unknown" in compat tables are ambiguous for color-blind people

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Design, defect, P2)

Description

[Janet Swisher]

What did you do?

1. Go to a page where the BC table includes "unknown" values, such as https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Ambient_Light_Events

What happened?

From https://github.com/mdn/sprints/issues/1457 :
'The issue I have is with distinguishing between "Full Support" and "Compatibility Unknown". To me, the two colors look the same. Also when I look at the legend at the bottom, I see no difference between the two colors picked for this. I see some difference between "No Support" and the others, but there the cross helps me best.'

What should have happened?

'I would suggest to pick colors that are more widely apart from each other in the color spectrum and to perhaps also introduce an icon of some sort (like the cross for No Support) for all statuses. This would help me out a lot.'

Is there anything else we should know?

For "stoplight" colors that are distinguishable to color-blind users, it is recommended to use vermilion in place of red and bluish green in place of green (see http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/colorblind/).

The issue reported here is lack of distinction between the green and gray colors. A difference in shade could help here (make one darker or lighter than the other), as well as an icon, as the OP suggests. Maybe a big fat question mark similar to the big fat X in the "Not supported" cells.

Comment 1

[Peter Bengtsson [:peterbe]]

Attachment: Screen Shot 2019-05-06 at 12.18.47 PM.png

Chrome Lighthouse report on Accessibility.

Comment 2

[BMO Automation]

MDN Web Docs' bug reporting has now moved to GitHub. From now on, please file content bugs at https://github.com/mdn/sprints/issues/ and platform bugs at https://github.com/mdn/kuma/issues/.