Tuesday, August 31, 2004

text on site is invisible

Hi Nathan. Great site. I wanted to give you a heads-up on a technical problem. A bunch of the site's text (including your comments) is invisible because its pages force a white background on the browser but do not always set the text color to black. When the text color is left undefined, the user's operating system will draw the text in the system-default text color. That color might be white, which creates white text against your white background.

I posted a screen shot of the problem at http://AmbitiousProductions.com/probs/commercialprob.gif.

To demonstrate the problem, go into the Windows Control Panel's Display / Appearance settings and select the "high contrast black" color scheme. It's not the most attractive (it's for people with impaired vision), but it'll illustrate the error if you visit your site.

If your pages are going to override users' color preferences, they need to override them completely (foreground AND background). There's no way to ensure that the color you picked for the background isn't the same as the color the user picked for text.

This problem is easy to fix. The site's pages or styles need to be corrected so they always set the text color to black.

Regards,
Gavin Stokes

1 comment:

Nathan Alexander said...

Hi Gavin, thanks for the heads-up.
I would say 90% of the text on my site is set to "default".
It's possible you may be one of about 8 people in the USA with their default text color set to white,
but it's a problem worth looking into, and I'll fix it as I update the site.

Take care,

Nathan Alexander
commercialsihate.com