The sweep has checked WCAG AA contrast for a long time and the page passed. That
result was worth less than it looked.
WCAG 2's ratio is a luminance gap, and a luminance gap overstates readability once
one colour is near black — which is every reading on a page whose ground is #141414.
Tuning a colour until it clears 4.5:1 there lands on text that passes the audit and
still reads as a smudge across a table in a dim room. Several rules in this
stylesheet said as much in their own comments, one of them "measured 4.5:1 at
#a5a5a5 exactly, so it sits above that": the right instinct through the wrong lens.
The check also could not see half the backgrounds it scored against. It reads
background-color and takes the best contrast of any candidate ancestor, so text on
the felt was scored against the dark page behind the felt. Two plain AA failures sat
in a clean report for as long as the check has existed — the chair number on the
brown rim at 2.65:1, and the pot's own label, gold on green, at 2.66:1.
runContrastAudit.js scores with APCA and gets the background by screenshotting the
page with its text made transparent and reading the pixels, which no gradient or
shadow can fool. The first version walked the DOM and called the gold dealer button
black-on-black at Lc 0.4; that false positive is why it works this way.
Found: 65 of 92 pieces of text below their level, 54 passing AA at the same moment,
worst Lc 28. Now nothing is below Lc 60, nothing fails AA, and the worst is Lc 60.4.
Three fixes worth naming, none of them "make the grey lighter":
- A player's stack was secondary text at Lc 44, under a name in --text at a heavier
weight. That says a dealer needs the name more than the number; during a hand the
opposite is true. Hierarchy comes from size and weight now, which is free, rather
than from fading, which on a dark ground is the most expensive way to say it.
- An empty seat had no background of its own, so the felt decided how readable its
number was: Lc 28 on the rim, 30 on the green, 33 further in. It has a ground now,
at 0.62 and not the 0.82 first written — contrast is nearly flat across that range
and the heavier wash put four dark rectangles on the felt like holes.
- The pot's label sat on the one green in the design. The disc is deeper rather than
the label bleached, because gold on dark green is the pairing this page is built
on. Deepening only its outer stop moved it two points: the highlight is at 32%/28%
and that is exactly where the label sits.
apca.js is checked against the eight published reference pairs, png.js against
round-tripped fixtures for every filter. Four fault injections caught; a fifth
turned out to be a no-op — the Paeth predictor is symmetric in its first two
arguments over all 16,777,216 byte triples, so that swap is untestable, which is
written down rather than papered over with a fixture that appears to catch it.
Still below the strict APCA level: 55, all of them 10-12px labels that would need
white type or a bigger seat puck. Reported, not chased, and said out loud in the
sweep's own notes.
Layout sweep unchanged: 5 FAILs, 14 offender lines, no regressions. 950 tests pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015bnp7xKUPFFSpwkYNFaPgb
