Launchpad blog uses grey text

[Ketil Malde]

Looking for a way to tranfer video from a digital camera, I stumble across this:
  https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libmtp/0.2.5-1ubuntu1

I can fix the tiny text by hitting Ctrl-+ a number of times, but working around the fashionably unreadable color scheme is more difficult. Please, can we have colors for text and background that are distinguishable?

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

Ubuntu's (Canonical's) colour palette and web guidelines stipulate that we use #333333 for text colour. A lighter color of #AEA79F may be used for large text (large headings).

Lp commonly uses other grey's for text, such as whiteboards, activity, bug tags. comment headers and footers, listing tables, diffs, definition lists, and the default H2 shade. I have pondered landing a pre-emptive CSS change to make Lp compliant with the desgin guidelines before we are issues a red card by the design team.

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

We're not currently themed to match Canonical as a whole (the current
Launchpad theme didn't match Canonicals then-theme when it was
created). I'm not clear whether we should/shouldn't become
same-themed.

If we should, then we should do it tastefully and broadly, not piecemeal.

jml, do you know?

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

I think it is clear. We stalled 3.0 for the design team to make a decision--we dropped our header and footer designs for theirs. We have changed fonts twice by command of the design team. We will do what every the design team commands.

Launchpad's branding is a special situation (Lp shows the project brand over its own). It uses YUI to mange fonts and layout which is hard to translate to the guidelines. Yet Launchpad is a Canonical site and the design guidelines are not just about branding, they are also about consistent usable design. Our failure to factor out the 1.x and 2.x styles is largely because we still permit exceptions for each app and feature. The design guidelines provide a clear way of saying no to the exceptions and provide guidance to create simpler and faster CSS.

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

Oh, I guess the reason I know this is because I was contacted to ensure the changes are made each time.

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

Ok, cool - so lets do it :)

[Jonathan Lange (jml)]

Launchpad's branding strategy isn't decided yet. That's I conversation that I plan to have with higher-ups at Canonical in the not-too-distant future.

I'm happy for our text to get darker in the interim.

[Gary Poster (gary)]

On CHR duty, I just got another concern on feedback about readability (particularly for the blog) that I attribute to this.

[Gary Poster (gary)]

To be clear, I looked at the site in XP, as the user reported, and I agree that the combination of comparatively poor (IMO) text rendering in XP with the gray color yields a difficult to read site, particularly on the blog, where the body text is more gray.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

+1, this always annoys me when I try to read the help on a laptop screen.

blog.launchpad.net seems to use #828282 for body content, which is much paler than the canonical Canonical style, and dev.launchpad.net uses #4e4d4d which is substantially paler.

screen gamma is very variable and uncontrolled on Linux and Windows; we shouldn't use mid-brightness colors that rely on accurate gamma to have decent contrast.

[Rune K. Svendsen (runeks)]

As far as I can see, Launchpad itself (like this page) uses #838383, at least that what it looks like on my desktop (and that's what GIMP says). I'm including a screenshot. It's hard to see in light conditions, at evening time it's not a problem.

[Данило Шеган (danilo)]

Rune, it seems you are more likely a victim of antialiasing or a bad font (color used there is #333333, which is a pretty dark shade of gray). May I suggest you switch to DejaVu Mono for the monospaced fonts in your browser? (unfortunately, Chromium doesn't respect system-wide font settings in Ubuntu.)

[Rune K. Svendsen (runeks)]

Thanks a lot Данило (however you pronounce that :-))! That did the trick.
I was wondering why so few people had pointed it out since it seemed so grave to me.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

Per https://dev.launchpad.net/PolicyAndProcess/Accessibility#preview and http://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/visual-audio-contrast-contrast.html the blog's #828282 body text fails the minimum contrast requirement (level AA) and so this is High.

[Francis J. Lacoste (flacoste)]

The main site does meet the AAA accessibility level though, so that's a Won't Fix.