In this episode of Accessibility Craft, the team debates how to balance accessibility, brand identity, and platform consistency. The conversation centers on a significant UI refactor for the Accessibility Checker plugin, and the upcoming release of WordPress 7.0 with its new default color palette.
Before getting into the technical weeds, everyone samples KYLA Lavender Lemonade Hard Kombucha. This award-winning, 6.5% ABV kombucha sparks a debate of its own, mostly regarding the “mystical magic of happiness” promised on the can versus what we actually experienced.
Discussion Outline
- Beverage: We dive into the KYLA Sun Break Series Lavender Lemonade, its cool geometric can design, and of course, what it tastes like.
- Crowdfunding for WordCamp Europe: Details on the WP Accessibility Day campaign to fund a high-visibility accessibility help desk at WCEU.
- Accessibility Checker UI Refactor: An overview of major changes coming to the Accessibility Checker UI and how they led to a big debate about color contrast.
- The WordPress 7.0 Color Shift: How the “Fresh” color scheme moving to Default made us think twice about how we approach color.
- The Color Dilemma: A technical and philosophical debate on whether plugins should adopt core WordPress styles, define their own, or a hybrid of the two.
- Decisions, Decisions: Yes, we do reach a decision on what we’re going to do at the end. It’s a true “build in public” episode, folk
Links and Resources Discussed
- KYLA Lavender Lemonade Hard Kombucha
- WP Accessibility Day Fundraiser
- Accessibility Checker Changelog 11
- Steve’s Thread on X
Tune in to Accessibility Craft conversation episodes like this one every other Monday.
Accessibility Craft is hosted by Amber Hinds, Chris Hinds, and Steve Jones. They are experts in digital accessibility and creators of software, courses, and specialized services that have made millions of websites more accessible.
To learn more about us, you can visit our website.
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Transcript
Chris Hinds: Welcome to Accessibility Craft, where we explore the complex challenges and emerging trends that are shaping digital accessibility, while sipping on unique craft beverages. This show is proudly produced by Equalize Digital, The most trusted name in WordPress accessibility. Join us every week as we break down accessibility news and share the expert strategies we’ve used to help make millions of websites more accessible.
Grab a drink, the show starts now!
Amber Hinds: Hey everybody, it’s Amber and I’m here today with Chris.
Chris: Hey, everybody.
Amber Hinds: And Steve.
Steve Jones: Hello everyone.
Amber Hinds: And we are here on Accessibility Craft, episode number 154. And of course, we are gonna start with the beverage here in just a minute. But for anyone who wants show notes and a full transcript, head on over to AccessibilityCraft.com/154 to get those. What are we drinking today, Chris?
Today’s Beverage
Chris: We are drinking KYLA Lavender Lemonade Hard Kombucha. So they say this is a mouth wateringly bright mix of lemon with a flourish of lavender in alcoholic kombucha form, and it is six and a half percent alcohol by volume. If I sound shocked, it’s because I hadn’t read the can yet, and I’m a little bit like, whoa. I guess, I guess kombucha can pack a punch if you let it. But Amber, you saw this at the store and you were like, this is different.
Amber Hinds: You preempted me. I was gonna ask Steve, who do you think picked this drink?
Steve Jones: Well, based on the visual, look at the can, which is a very feminine looking lavender color with some fruits and plants and stuff, I assumed this was an Amber pick.
Amber Hinds: Yeah, I saw it at the store and I almost bought it just to try at home. And then I was like, wait, no, this would be a good podcast beverage. So I came home and I told Chris, I was like, they have hard kombucha at the store. You should put that on an episode. I like the can. It’s lavender, but it’s got this kind of like geometric line, like it’s super, I don’t know. I feel like you would see this decoration on people’s walls, on an HGTV home renovation show. Like it’s got the, it’s like triangles and I don’t know, like leaf shapes and lemons and that kind of stuff, but like this abstract kinda lavender and then the sunrise. It’s pretty feminine, I guess, but I like it.
Steve Jones: Yeah.
Chris: Yep. It’s girly and hippie dippy health forward with them having, you know, gluten-free, vegan, live culture emblazoned all over their can. I did think it was interesting and the thing that made me do a double take is apparently this has won some awards. So on their website they say that this won the gold medal in 2020 at the Canned Challenge Adult Beverage Competition, which I’ve never heard of, but maybe that’s big. And then they took the silver at the 2020 US Open Cider and Beverage Championships. So maybe this will be good. It won some awards.
Amber Hinds: Do you normally drink kombucha, Steve?
Steve Jones: No.
Amber Hinds: Chris doesn’t either.
Chris: What about lavender? What about lavender flavored stuff, Steve?
Steve Jones: Yeah, no. Lavender’s a weird flavor to like drink, right?
Amber Hinds: Oh man. Do you ever, you’re a tea drinker like me. Do you ever put lavender in your tea?
Steve Jones: No.
Amber Hinds: I don’t know if you’ve ever had a London fog, but basically it’s kind of like a chai. If you think about the concept of a chai where you’ve got a lot of milk and like sugar and it’s sweet, but a London fog is like Earl Gray tea with dried lavender mixed in it, and then it’s got like the steam milk and stuff, and I really like those.
Steve Jones: Well, I’m a chai guy, but I don’t put any milk and stuff in it or sugar in it. It’s just. Just…
Amber Hinds: Yup.
Steve Jones: Straight up. As you guys pop the top on these, I wanna read. I always think it’s interesting what they write on these cans, but it says, I’m gonna try not to laugh when I read it too, but… When the Pacific Northwest sun breaks through the gray, euphoria radiates. We’ve captured that essence in our Sun Break Series. Bright and alive, the mystical magic of happiness.
Chris: It sounds like they smashed a couple of haikus together or something.
Steve Jones: How many of these did they drink before they wrote that?
Amber Hinds: So wait, Chris, I guess I don’t drink enough alcohol to actually know the answer, but six is high? That’s higher than a beer? How does it compare to like wine?
Steve Jones: A can?
Chris: Lower than wine. We’ve had plenty of beers that are between like, five and nine percent on here. It’s just I was just, my expectation was that this would end up being lower alcohol. Like I just kind of expected to read two or three percent and it came in at double that.
Amber Hinds: Yeah, so I think what is interesting about this, if you read the ingredients and we’re smelling it. But it’s got water, kombucha culture, black tea, fake sweeteners, so like erythritol, lemon juice, citric acid organic red a, which is a stevia leaf extract, vegetable juice, hibiscus flowers, organic lavender flowers, natural flavors, lavender essential oil. When I thought of hard kombucha, I thought they were like, like a hard seltzer. Like they were taking kombucha and adding vodka to it or something. So…
Chris: I think the alcohol’s coming from the fermentation.
Amber Hinds: … the alcohol is coming just from the kombucha process,
Steve Jones: I think.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Amber Hinds: Which I did not expect.
Chris: I’ve read before that all kombuchas are slightly alcoholic, even the ones that don’t advertise themselves as being alcohol.
Amber Hinds: I smell orange juice.
Steve Jones: I was gonna, that’s funny you said orange juice. ‘Cause I was gonna say it, it smells and tastes like orange juice that’s gone bad.
Amber Hinds: So it tastes okay. I gotta taste some, now.
Steve Jones: Well, like fermented orange juice.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Or like orange juice you watered down.
Amber Hinds: Like a mimosa.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah.
Amber Hinds: Does it taste like a mimosa to you, Steve?
Steve Jones: I guess, not really. But I mean, I get why. I don’t know, maybe a little bit.
Amber Hinds: I don’t think it smells bad, like it…
Chris: I feel like it’s kind of flat on the citrus and it’s kind of just like sour and bubbly and not floral. I was expecting more, I was expecting more on the lavender front than what I got.
Amber Hinds: I can’t get any lavender.
Steve Jones: Are you getting lavender at all?
Chris: No, and that’s pretty much it. I’m not really, I thought I would smell it ’cause it’s such a strong smell when it’s there.
Steve Jones: I mean, it has this interesting dryness thing to it. You know, I kind of like dry wines and dry Diet Coke. Like it’s got a dry thing.
Amber Hinds: I think a lot of kombucha kind of has that. I mean, it is very fizzy, more than I expect a kombucha to be. It’s almost foaming in my mouth. So it makes it hard for me to taste it ’cause I’m like trying to hold it and taste it, it’s like fizzing.
I get more lemon on the flavor than I do on the nose. I don’t get lavender at all. And I keep trying to look for it because I do drink lavender. It does kind of have a, like vodka-y aftertaste to me.
I don’t know, like the kind of flavor it leaves is a little bit on that edge. If I think about all the liquors.
Chris: I don’t hate it, but it’s not what I expected. And I’m kind of bummed that I’m not tasting or smelling lavender. Because it’s the first word in the flavor, so, you know.
Amber Hinds: You know, I will give them though, if this is the Sun Break series, like I did really think when I smelled it and tasted it, that it was reminiscent of a mimosa. I would have this at brunch.
Steve Jones: Are you a brunch person?
Amber Hinds: Oh my gosh, yes.
Steve Jones: Oh.
Amber Hinds: Breakfast is my favorite meal of the day. Food, breakfast food is my favorite. I would eat it at any time of day. And I would eat brunch every day if I could. Of course, life is the reality and so I don’t, you know, do like fancy brunches with alcoholic beverages. I mean, I don’t even know. Do we do that like once every couple of months?
Chris: No, not even.
Amber Hinds: But if I was, I would maybe pick this, like I would actually be like, I’m gonna go get a hard kombucha. I’m sad it doesn’t have lavender, but I like it otherwise.
Chris: Yep. So Amber, you give that a thumbs up then?
Amber Hinds: Mm-hmm. One.
Chris: I’m kind of one thumb in the middle on this one. Not sure if I would go out of my way to get it ever again, and if there were other options arrayed on a table with this one being one of them, I think I’d probably choose one of the other options. But if it was the only choice, I wouldn’t, you know, just drink water.
So it’s not horrible. Kind of where I’m at with it. What about you, Steve?
Steve Jones: Yeah. I mean, I’d give it a thumbs up on its design. The design of the can is pretty slick, but on the taste I can’t really taste lavender at all. I just, so I’d probably give it like a thumbs in the middle that’s slightly pointing down. Not a full thumbs down, but you know, almost pointing down.
Chris: Teetering, it’s teetering.
Steve Jones: Teetering.
Chris: Alright, that was KYLA Hard Kombucha. And we’re gonna let our kombucha settle. And Amber, I think while we do that, you have an update to share with something that WP Accessibility Day’s doing right now?
WP Accessibility Day Crowdfunding WordCamp EU Accessibility Booth
Amber Hinds: Yes, so WP Accessibility Day is running a crowdfunding campaign. I’ll say, this is actually a really interesting experiment. I was talking to Taco Verdonschot, who was one of our organizers. A lot of people might know him, he used to be at Yoast and is now at Progress Planner, about some feedback that we’ve gotten in Europe about people not understanding the European Accessibility Act and how it applies to them, and really just that there needs to be more education there.
And of course, WordPress Accessibility Day is a 24 hour event that runs talks during European Times, but our registration has stayed kind of low from Europe. It’s grown in a lot of other areas and so we thought maybe it would be cool to try and have a really big sponsor booth to promote the event, but also just to do a help desk during WordCamp Europe in a very visible way that puts accessibility front and center for people. We’re looking at having an editor size booth, so that’s one of the really big ones you could walk into, right?
So people say, whoa, what is this accessibility thing? It’s important. Of course, as a nonprofit, WordPress Accessibility Day doesn’t just have $30,000 sitting around to get an Editor level booth at WordCamp, so we are raising money for it, and we started a crowdfunding campaign that people can donate to as of the recording date, and I’m super hoping that it will be higher by the time this comes out, we’ve raised $2,709.
And I think it’s an interesting experiment ’cause it will be like, do people in the community want there to be this big accessibility help desk at WordCamp Europe? Are they willing to pay to make that happen? So that’s what we’re doing. I don’t know if you guys have any thoughts about it or questions I can answer.
Chris: I think having anything that gets accessibility front and center is good. Obviously I’m a little biased. But the other thing about it that I think is interesting, is I feel like that’s more useful than yet another accessibility talk, right? Or people finding an accessibility company leader in the hallway and having an incidental conversation. Like having a booth there that has tables and laptops set up where people can go and get actual help and get actual questions answered by experts is way different than what they would normally get on the accessibility front at a WordCamp Europe or a different event of that type. I think it’s a good idea. We’ll see if people vote with their dollars to make it happen.
Steve Jones: I would just tag on that, you know, Equalize Digital is doing our part to support that effort as well. And we’re, you know, putting our money where our mouth is and we would implore anybody listening to do the same.
Amber Hinds: Yes, so we are obviously supporting it. I’m hoping to be there. We’ll see how it goes. I hope everyone will go take a look at that fundraiser, which you can see if you go to WPAccessibility.Day. And we’ll throw a link for that in the show notes.
Now of course, I was thinking about our big topic for today, and sometimes we talk about what’s going on in the news. Sometimes we have been using these for little like build in public discussions I was thinking that maybe we should talk about color contrast because this is something that has been coming up in our work, in our Accessibility Checker plugin.
So I’d like to talk about that. But first we’re gonna take a short commercial break.
Brought to you by Accessibility Checker
Steve Jones: This episode of Accessibility Craft is sponsored by Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker, the WordPress plugin that helps you find accessibility problems before you hit publish. Thousands of businesses, nonprofits, universities, and government agencies around the world trust Accessibility Checker to help their teams find, fix, and prevent accessibility problems on an ongoing basis.
New to accessibility? Equalized Digital Accessibility Checker is here to teach you every step of the way. Whether you’re a content creator or a developer, our detailed documentation guides you through fixing accessibility issues. Never lose track of accessibility again with real time scans each time you save, powerful reports inside the WordPress dashboard and a front end view to help you track down hard to find issues.
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The Background on Why There’s a Color Contrast Debate
Amber Hinds: We’re back. Steve, you and William have been significantly refactoring Accessibility Checker’s UI to bring it more in line with modern WordPress. People can tune into our latest Change Log live stream to get a full picture of these changes. But Steve, before we talk about the specific color contrast issue, can you give maybe a high level of what you’ve been changing so we know, like maybe set the stage for this color contrast discussion.
Steve Jones: Yeah, totally. So we’re kind of taking our first pass at some UI and UX refactoring inside the plugin. The plugin has reached a threshold of being five years old, and we thought it was time to kind of take a look at some of that and try to bring it up to speed with modern WordPress. We think that modern WordPress is at a place where we can achieve some of these things in an accessible way without you know, causing too many regressions in accessibility.
So at a high level, we’re moving the legacy meta box into the block editor sidebar. Now, a little caveat there is the meta box is not going away because it needs to be there for backwards compatibility and for compatibility with websites, or post, or pages, that don’t support the block editor.
We updated terminology, information hierarchy, how color and shape and severity are communicated, and, we remediated kind of how things are grouped and sorted and organized to better surface issues to you and the best way that you should action on those. So overall, it was a practice to bring, the meta box into the sidebar.
So you now have your Accessibility Checker on the sidebar, and you have your content on the other side. You can be looking at both of them at the same time. You don’t have to scroll down to the meta box and then scroll back up. And just doing a complete reevaluation of all the colors and terms and grouping and sorting that we were currently doing and how we can improve that.
Chris: And for people listening by the time this episode airs, you should be able to go run updates in Accessibility Checker, and I believe you will see the first round of these UI improvements in your WordPress dashboard, which is super exciting. We might show a little bit of that today as we have our build in public discussion.
But while doing this work one thing we have started doing is testing this with WordPress 7.0 beta, which I think beta two just came out recently at the time of this conversation. And some interesting things have come up with colors because this release is including a new default color scheme inside the admin.
As well as just I think some admin UI tweaks in general. And Steve, you tweeted about the color changes that you observed when testing this. What did you see?
Steve Jones: So this refactor has been going on for, you know, most of 2026. So the last couple months. And we actually were not testing with the beta ’cause the beta actually just came out, last week, last Friday or something? So, it just came out beta one and beta two has actually dropped since then, I think last night.
And, we then decided to install and see what’s going on. Is anything new that we’re making breaking or is it breaking any past stuff? And yeah. A big change with 7.0 is the default color scheme is now changed. I think this is a color scheme you could switch to before, but now it’s default.
So Fresh, used to be the default and Fresh is not the default anymore. The default just, it uses a brighter blue. A much brighter blue. I think it may have better contrast in some instances, but the real problem that arises from this is that our brand blue and even the WordPress logo brand blue was very in line with that Fresh color palette.
And so like in the plugin, if we restyled links to be our blue, then it kind of matched with the default theme. And it kind of matched with WordPress. And it matched with our brand. But now this new default theme has these very bright, vivid blues in there, and you’re now seeing links that don’t match because some are inheriting the core blue and some have our own blue defined.
To Follow Core, or Not to Follow Core: That is the Question
Steve Jones: So it, it brought up the conversation around what path should we take? Should we inherit from core or should we override and use our own?
Amber Hinds: And that’s really what I wanna talk about. I’m wondering if you could pull up your screen and show us an example of where we can see the new blue, and our defined blue next to each other.
Steve Jones: So I have my screen share up so you can see the default is now this new color palette. So it’s you know, kind of a similar dark black or off black, maybe slightly gray. And this bright blue and this kind of lighter blue, whereas this fresh color palette was the one previously.
Amber Hinds: That was more tealish, almost the fresh blue.
Steve Jones: Yeah, it was a more subtle blue not as bright and, so you can see it right away in the sidebar. You can see that blue at practice here. The red count circles are now blue. So that’s been removed. I kind of liked the red ’cause it’s like…
Amber Hinds: Still saying, Hey, you need updates, pay attention to me.
Steve Jones: So it’s like just as we did with our sidebar and like trying to evaluate, are we using color to convey meaning the best way possible? That practice needs to happen as well when UX is being evaluated in core. You know, if these previously showed red, which means like this is important, look at it, and now they mean blue, is the meaning of that count changed now?
Amber Hinds: That was part of the whole conversation that we had, which you don’t need to rehash, but people should definitely go watch that change log that you did with William. ‘Cause you talked about meaning of color and how we change them so much in our own plugin. I don’t know if, I haven’t been paying enough attention to know if these conversations are happening in the WordPress level.
Steve Jones: I mean, and it’s very important and you know, us being an accessibility plugin too, we went a step further and we’re kind of evaluating shape. So we don’t wanna convey meaning with color only. We actually have introduced a unique shape to each one of those colors.
So that if somebody can’t tell the difference between those colors, that they have a another way to tell the difference between those icons and those statuses in its shape. But to your question about the the color. So I’ve pulled open a post with the Accessibility Checker plugin, and for those that haven’t seen, we have this new sidebar and I’ll zoom in a bit, so it’s a lot easier to see.
We have a new sidebar here in the block editor.
Chris: Just we gotta pause there and do a little clap for the responsiveness and how all that just worked beautifully.
Steve Jones: Yeah, so that wasn’t really user testing, but I didn’t zoom in my screen. I actually just, I increased the zoom on the browser by just zooming in and everything scaled up fine. So that was a little bit of, does it look good at 200% and it, and fortunately it does.
So we have this new sidebar here and you can see that we’re utilizing a lot of core components that are built in and it’s inheriting the new color in some instances, but in some instances it is not like in these core tabs.
And we may have, you know, we may have modified these a little bit, but the focus on these tabs actually is, a different blue. It may be our blue and so this is something that we have to evaluate whether or not we want to remove those or did William make these, that color, because it actually doesn’t inherit a proper focus outline in general. And if it doesn’t, you know, that’s something we can open with the Gutenberg team.
So the sidebar you’ll notice like here these links are blue, they’re not inheriting the core blue. And this wasn’t really noticeable with the other theme because the blues were so similar.
So, if I look at like the Classic meta box here as well, and I can zoom out a little bit because that meta box is a lot bigger. We are trying to keep parody between the sidebar and the meta box so that they kind of convey the same meaning and have the same functionality in case you don’t have the block editor enabled.
But if I pull open our accessibility analysis panel and then open it, you can see this again where we’ve got, we’re inheriting this default style and then we’re using our own here. So this raises a question. Now since core is changing, what do we do? Do we inherit, do we not inherit? If we inherit, then we inherit the accessibility issues as well.
And if somebody chooses a color that’s not accessible, there’s not much we can do to control that. So that’s kind of the main topic of discussion here on where we go with this.
Chris: Visual aids are so helpful.
Steve Jones: Yeah.
Amber Hinds: I so it, it is really interesting because on the one hand, part of me is as a plugin developer, we should try to make our UI as consistent with core WordPress in hopes that all other plugin developers would, so that it feels like a unified piece of software when you’re in the editor.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Amber Hinds: That’s one take that I have on it. But then I have this other accessibility hat. I think you talked about that last time. Putting on your accessibility hat, this came up when I was testing our beta, that there were some links in the modal and maybe you could open the, an issue modal that we’ve added. I was not testing with 7.0. I was testing with current live WordPress, and on the sidebar here. This probably passes contrast with 7.0, but in the current version of WordPress, it takes the default color, and even though it’s on this very light gray background, the default WordPress in the current one is 4.5 to one on a white background. So the second you put, I don’t even know what this is, it’s so barely gray, but the…
Steve Jones: Yeah.
Amber Hinds: … Second you do anything that is literally not straight FFF F for white. It fails contrast with the default color. So that’s my frustration is that there’s not enough space for us to even add this in. Half people wouldn’t even realize there’s gray background on that. It’s so subtle. So, so I’m balancing these two things between, we should just match core and no, we should make it better.
I’m curious, Chris, ’cause I think you have seen this, the least out of like me and Steve and maybe thought about it, like what’s your gut reaction? Should plug in developers just match core or should we try and make it better and have our own colors on everything?
Chris: Well, like the thing that Steve pointed out is probably a chief concern, right? Is you inherit or rely or lean on core, that’s something that is outside or external to your direct control. But it’s not just, I mean we do that anyway ’cause we’re building an extension of a CMS, but if we’re relying on that for our styles and how the thing looks too, and not just trying to extend its functionality, I do feel like that adds more risk. Because one of the things that I’m thinking about now, like looking at the settings panel that Steve was sharing earlier, where it showed all the different, you know, stylistic formats you could apply to the backend of WordPress.
There’s nine or eight different color schemes there, and if we’re suddenly inheriting, you know, just the color scheme. I don’t know if we would just inherit whatever the site setting is or if we would say no, we’re only gonna inherit, you know, default WordPress, but that’s a consideration, right?
Because what does that do if someone applies, you know, a custom admin style or one of these other styles and it causes some sort of visual issue, and is the person using our tool going to be savvy enough to know, oh, that’s not them. That’s because I have this setting over here. They may not be, they may be like, wow, that Equalize Digital team doesn’t even get basic color contrast in the back end of their tool. I can’t trust them, right?
When it’s actually not even our fault. We’re just inheriting a bad style setting. So there’s risk there. And don’t know how we circumvent that or…
Amber Hinds: So…
Chris: …what that means.
Amber Hinds: I wanna do two things because I think it would be really interesting. One is, I think we should have Steve switch to one of these horrible color palettes and I will say pick Sunrise, for example, which for folks who are not looking, it has…
Chris: a lot of red and pink.
Amber Hinds: Oh man. You don’t even have to save the change. It just doesn’t, I guess that’s your preview.
Steve Jones: Yeah, I think you have to save it, yeah.
Amber Hinds: And now you refresh. Oh man. Oh, okay. So there fails contrast because there’s literally yellow things with white text on them.
Steve Jones: Yeah, interestingly, this link didn’t change, is it doesn’t have a blue in the palette.
Amber Hinds: Can you inspect that and see where the color is coming from?
Steve Jones: It’s still coming from core. So they actually did not update the link colors. They kept ’em kind of this default blue. They don’t, it’s the link color is not in the sunrise color palette.
Amber Hinds: So…
Steve Jones: That’s interesting.
Amber Hinds: … That is helpful to know, which is that if we adopt, then it won’t totally fail.
Steve Jones: Yeah, these hover states completely fail now because that’s inheriting.
Chris: And the Clear Issues button too.
Steve Jones: Yeah, and you can see we actually are inheriting some orange underline here as well. There’s a blue and in orange on the tabs. See, this stays blue because this is actually our blue. But we have an orange button here now, which you know, for our listeners, orange you’re really gonna have a hard time getting orange to work unless you really make it look brown.
Yeah, all of our UI inherits that. I mean, and, you know, color contrast aside, like a thing that, that kind of was a concern for me a little bit was like, I have these tabs and I have this button. Now this button’s oranges in, it doesn’t match these tabs. Should my tabs inherit that blue color too, right?
So you start to go who, whose brand and whose color palette should be priority? Does that cause our brand harm, like Chris was saying, to have this orange color and not match up, it looks not cohesive now.
Amber Hinds: So it is worth noting for anyone who’s, Well, why are these failures even exist in WordPress core. The only color palette that is required to pass color contrast for WordPress accessibility is a default one. So there’s a bunch here like ocean. I could just tell looking at that. That’s got like light blues and greens and a brown tanish color.
I mean, the whole admin bar fails color contrast in that one. It’s even worse than the sunrise one. I don’t think we can account for any of those sub pallets, I am curious, should we adopt default? And one of the thoughts that I had is could we test and compare default blue and see if it has higher contrast to our blue? And if it does, that might be an argument for just allowing default to pass through. You could inspect and compare contrast on like the clear issues versus, you know, the accessibility status tab, and just see the difference in the colors.
Steve Jones: So the new bright blue in WordPress 7.0 has a 5.61 contrast ratio?
Amber Hinds: So this seems like a good accessibility improvement to WordPress overall.
Steve Jones: Yes, it is. It has greater color contrast than the previous. Let’s look at our blue. So it’s 5.03, so the new one is slightly, yeah.
The Color Contrast Debate Concludes
Amber Hinds: So for me, if I’m thinking like we’re literally trying to make a decision right now, I would air towards, maybe we make all our colors adopt the default, then they’ll match throughout the UI and it’s better contrast than we previously had.
Chris: And is there a way to match the default without then exposing ourself to matching to whatever color scheme they pick? If someone picks one of the different ones?
Steve Jones: No, I don’t think so.
Chris: That’s hard.
Amber Hinds: So the thing about that is I have a hard time imagining someone has chosen like the ocean color palette, which makes their entire admin sidebar completely unreadable to them. And then they go to our thing, they’re like, why does your have bad color contracts? Do you know what I mean? I feel like if they have actively chosen low contrast.
Steve Jones: Yeah.
Amber Hinds: So I think as long as the core WordPress doesn’t fail contrast, then we’ll be okay.
Steve Jones: The default.
Chris: I guess the default will be what most people are on anyway. I don’t know who changes their preferred color palette in the backend of an admin ui. Maybe some people do, maybe they’re into that.
Steve Jones: Yeah.
Amber Hinds: I mean, I changed my Basecamp default color scheme to purple.
Chris: I’m dark mode all the way, but…
Steve Jones: yeah. Yeah. Same here.
Amber Hinds: I didn’t make my background purple. It just changes, you have an option to change your button colors and purple is prettier than blue, right? Matches are a pretty drink. Some people like to do that, but I mean, for me, like the answer then, if somebody messages us and submits a support thing that’s Hey, your contrast, then this is low. We…
Chris: The second they share a screenshot, we’re gonna know.
Amber Hinds: You have chosen a low color contrast scheme from WordPress core. Go switch back to the default, and you’ll be fine.
Steve Jones: Right, and I think this was like an overarching practice in this refactor for us. We are moving from a design that was very unique to Accessibility Checker for the last five years. And in a way it made Accessibility Checker very identifiable. When you saw that meta box with the big colors, you’re like, oh, that’s Accessibility Checker. Right?
And through this practice we’re trying to adopt better color and meaning and trying to kind of dovetail into WordPress a little bit better. And I think adopting that default color probably is the answer here. And it does kind of make Accessibility Checker, like I said, integrate into WordPress in a more seamless manner.
Amber Hinds: So, can I throw one wrench in here?
Steve Jones: Yes.
Amber Hinds: We are an accessibility plugin. Should we meet AAA, which is above and beyond the current standards of WordPress core, and would that be the argument for not matching, but also not using our current blue going for better contrast?
Steve Jones: Yeah, I mean, my take on it is that it seems like with color contrast sometimes we want to take that extra step into AAA ’cause it’s kind of an easy win of sorts to, to meet AAA.
Now I will say, when when you’re redesigning a UI like we’ve done here, having to aim for AAA is a little hard ’cause sometimes you wanna visually show hierarchy with shades of black or gray. And with AAA, you know, the range in which that you can go from black to gray is very short.
So, if you want to have a black title and like a subtitle that is you know, kind of grayed out so you can say, this is important, but it’s not super, super important. It’s not as important as this other thing that gets a little bit harder. There may be a bigger question too, is you know, if you’re aiming for AAA in one respect, why aren’t you aiming for it in all respects, right?
Is it better to meet just AAA color contrast? Yeah, sure. But did you aim for all the other AAA things as well? And core, like you said, core has a AA requirement that they’re trying to meet. And we are integrating into core now a lot with this new sidebar. And we’re utilizing a lot of core components that are built at AA level.
Amber Hinds: What do you think, Chris?
Chris: Well, I mean, I can only take judgment calls so far when it comes to software development because I’m not a CTO. But I think one consideration would just be that of dependencies, right? Don’t know if that’s the right word for it. Or maybe deviations. That’s the D word I’m looking for.
If we’re gonna have a lot of dependencies on decisions based on core components and core color schemes and trying to just inherit their interface with our own layout for what we need anywhere that we diverge from that. . It’s a discrepancy, right?
That we have to maintain and consider. Because what if, for sake of example, right? Let’s say we decide to make of our stuff darker. And so it no longer inherits the core blue.
Steve Jones: What
Chris: if core, at some point in the future decides to do like an inverted color palette, but we’re only factoring in our color decisions.
You know, having like darker text, we would suddenly have a slightly less dark color on a really dark color, and all the contrast would be broken. And we would, because of that, like slight divergence where we weren’t inheriting. I don’t know that core would suddenly do that, right. But I could see them eventually adding like a dark mode into the backend of WordPress at some point.
And I would say that , if we’re gonna hitch our wagon to components and core style decisions, I think that, I think we’re hitching our wagon to it an extent. Um, that’s my thought.
Steve Jones: I mean, I tag onto that too a little bit. You’re taking on what we might call technical debt of maintaining that moving forward. But you know, there, there is too….
Chris: That’s the word, thank you.
Steve Jones: There is an interesting piece here too, because this is WordPress 7.0 moving forward is gonna have this color, but, you know, 6.9 and previous versions don’t. We try to maintain compatibility three versions back. I will say that you can go many versions back and the plugin still works like several versions back, but requirement from a coding perspective is three versions back.
And so if we make the switch now, we inherit everything now. That means that if you have 7.0, the contrast is better. But like Amber said a little while ago, that the previous blue didn’t have as great of color contrast and you pretty much had to have it on white to ensure that you met AA requirements for color contrast.
So we fixed this for 7.9. That’s coming out soon, very soon. And you have some users on 7.0 and you have some on 6.9 and back. So your compliance is different for every user, kind of at that point.
Amber Hinds: This is an interesting thought because I’m planning to update our Accessibility Conformance Report this year. ‘Cause it’s been a while since we’ve done that. And that’s part of why we’re doing this extra thorough testing right now in preparation for that. But we would literally have to say, I think in that, that our conformance is based on the assumption that people are using 7.0 or newer. Or maybe even when we write that ACR, we’ll just have to say 7.0 ’cause that’s the version of WordPress we tested with when we did the ACR.
It’s such an interesting place to be in, to have to develop and make these choices as a plugin author when you’re integrating into someone else’s software that you can’t really control. And I know we need to wrap things up, but it’s like we could say we’re gonna use default core colors. And then an option is, instead of adding the AAA colors in our own plugin, we could go maybe submit a different like AAA color scheme to WordPress. So that might be an option. And then people could choose to toggle that on. And then if they wanted that, it would also make all of our colors. Like maybe the name would literally be WCAG AAA, and it would just be a modification of the default. I don’t know.
Chris: Or something super clear, like to everyday people, High Contrast or something. Right?
Amber Hinds: High Contrast maybe would be a better option.
Steve Jones: We’re short on time, so I don’t wanna get too technical about it. But these themes actually are they’re style overrides, so you have a default and then when you adopt it, they kind of override a lot of things and it overrides a lot of things in core.
But then when you introduce something like that, you gotta think that if we’re dealing with color issues in our plugin, like how do we handle this? Every plugin is dealing with this problem. So, so it’s gonna become like a global thing. If people adopt this default, which they will, it becomes a little more standard around all the plugins.
So yeah, it’s not just core, it’s all the things, it’s all the plugins as well, right?
Amber Hinds: Did we make a decision? Did we decide we’re gonna adopt core colors in our plugin?
Steve Jones: I think we did. I think we’re going to try it.
Chris: That’s what it sounded like.
Steve Jones: Yeah, I think we’re gonna try to inherit and we’re gonna try to play nice with WordPress.
Amber Hinds: Yeah, I think from a UI consistency standpoint, I think as a plug developer, that’s probably our best bet. But now I’ve got my brain going about can I submit a skin?
Steve Jones: Yeah. It’d be interesting.
Amber Hinds: Well, if that happens, we will have to record a follow-up episode where we talk all about it.
Chris: Run those Accessibility Checker updates and get on WordPress 7.0 when it’s out. And you will have a clean, slick, cool, new modern UI. Won’t that be fun?
Steve Jones: Absolutely.
Chris: Bye everybody.
Steve Jones: See you.
Chris: Thanks for listening to Accessibility Craft. If you found this episode valuable, please help us reach more people by subscribing, reviewing, or liking the show, and sharing this with your colleagues. Accessibility Craft is a production of Equalize Digital Inc. Steve Jones composed our theme music. To learn how Equalize Digital can support you on your accessibility journey, visit us at EqualizeDigital.com.