spoilers gone grey

[supervillan]

Hi, is there a deliberate change made today to spoilers on the forums?

new grey background:

Looks like all spoilers are now grey. This makes dice expressions more difficult to read. Green over grey isn't good. eg:

initiative: 1d20 + 10 ⇒ (1) + 10 = 11

Can we change back please?

[RexAliquid]

Wow. That is really helpful. Thanks for pointing this out!

[Brian Bauman]

Yes - having more clearly delineated spoilers is an old feature that regressed at some point in the past. We reintroduced the feature yesterday. Thanks for letting us know about the contrast issue with the dice roller! Our design team is currently reviewing the grey-green interaction to see what can be done.

[supervillan]

Thanks Brian.

From my perspective the grey is not in any way an improvement. I know I'm only one user, but I am a heavy user of play-by-post on the forums and the grey makes reading everything under spoiler more difficult.

[Andostre]

Thanks so much for this!

I see that the spoilers are indented and shaded. If the shading is too much, even just keeping the indention is very helpful.

[Dancing Wind]

Brian Bauman wrote:

Our design team is currently reviewing the grey-green interaction to see what can be done.

I'd like to make a less specific plea:

Could your design team work on an automatic design review checklist that always includes evaluating the UI for accessibility?

I'm not sure why Paizo isn't using "accessible design" protocols on every consumer-facing product. It's not something new, and with the heavy shift to online gaming in the past few years, it has become more and more important for the IT folks to pay at least as much attention to this issue as the print people do.

"We'll take a look if you find it and point it out to us" puts a heavy burden on people who are struggling to use the product in the first place.

[Hilary Moon Murphy]

Hey Brian, count me in as someone who finds the new grey in the spoilers unreadable. I am going to have to abandon spoilers completely in my posts and PBP character sheets if we keep this lack of contrast. Can we please go back to clear backgrounds for spoilers?

[grimdog73]

i suggest maybe a different font for spoilers...can't be that hard to code...just a thought

[kaervek78]

Here's another vote against the grey background in spoilers.
However, I also like the idea of having more clearly delineated spoilers.

If I may suggest a different solution:

You could put a colored border around the spoiler.
So instead of a completely grey spoiler-box you could have a white box with a thin black border. Or maybe use light pastel blue (or whatever it's called - you know, the same color as ooc-text) for more subtlety.

As far as I know (and that's not very much, but still not nothing), if a design element has a background color, it has a border, too - and this border can be set to a different color...

[Eric Parker 82]

The Dark Grey with the green dice roller text is really hard to read. I think a number of the suggestions in terms of a much lighter grey or a border would be better.

[Governayle]

Spoiler:

OOC print is worse than the Dice Roller: 1d1 ⇒ 1 print

[Brian Bauman]

Hello, all. Thanks to everyone for the feedback.

We pretty clearly dropped the ball on this one, so we've reverted the change to spoiler tags while we revisit both this change in particular and our processes surrounding design and accessibility in general.

[Anguish]

So... no XML file where you can just change some RGB values to ones that are higher-contrast?

I mean, I've had the deepest sympathy for those who have had to work on this site for the last decade but it sounds like the back-end continues to be arduous.

[Brian Bauman]

Anguish wrote:

So... no XML file where you can just change some RGB values to ones that are higher-contrast?

The build process for changes like this is very simple. This isn't a technical issue, but rather a symptom of a number of design shortcomings in the site.

For example, according to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, text should generally have a contrast of greater than 4.5:1 compared to its background color. Multiple colors for text in use on the older pages of our website, forums included, are incapable of meeting this guideline, even with a high-contrast background of pure white. The background implemented for spoiler tags had contrast issues, and moving the background color towards white would not only make them harder to distinguish from non-spoiler regions, but would still fail to meet the contrast guidelines.

Rather than making new changes to the user experience without improving accessibility, we put things back the way they were while our designers reconsider our color palette.

[Dancing Wind]

Brian Bauman wrote:

Rather than making new changes to the user experience without improving accessibility,

Thank you so much Brian and team!

[Gisher]

Accessibility is the critical issue, but a new color palette would also be nice just for the change.

[Watery Soup]

A vertical black line down the left edge of the spoiler would have my vote.

[Andostre]

Even just the indentation was helpful, if the shading doesn't work out. I'd hate for this to get stuck in the design phase for any length of time when a "good enough" solution is immediately available.

[supervillan]

The indentation did not work for mobile browsers (at least not for Chrome for Android) - it just shunted the text to the right whereas what we have now is easily readable centre-justification.

[Andostre]

supervillan wrote:

The indentation did not work for mobile browsers (at least not for Chrome for Android) - it just shunted the text to the right whereas what we have now is easily readable centre-justification.

Ah, good to know. Thanks.