TechSoup

Vincent Flanders’ comments: TechSoup is the technology site for non-profits and it’s hugely important. I trust that if you work for a 501(c)3 organization, you’re getting your technology products from TechSoup. I hope you’re getting a lot of your information from them, too. If you’re not, you’re either stealing software, using outdated software, or somebody’s paying too much.

Their previous site’s design was…functional. It certainly didn’t have “a real pretty mouth.” What it did have, for the most part, was readability. You could easily read the text (well, 97.86% of the text). The problem occurred when you put white text on that puke-gold (#cc9900) background.

Well, TechSoup decides its time for a redesign (here’s the new home page) and, while they managed not to succumb to a lot of temptations to suck up their site, they had to get artsy with their text color. I don’t know why designers are in love with grayish text (#666666) on a white background. Maybe they’re on Macs and the color looks great. PC laptop screens also can give a distorted view of text color.

On the day I checked out the contrast on the new TechSoup home page using AccessColor, I received the following report:

The W3C recommends a standard of 500 or greater for the color difference and a standard of 125 or greater for color brightness.

Based on these considerations, the results for this page are:

1. Both color difference and color brightness do not meet the recommended standard for 0% of the total text.
2. Either color difference or color brightness does not meet the recommended standard for 69.32% of the total the text.A Warning message is displayed next to the HTML source line.

Text on background with images is for 20.31% of the total text.

Like the good, pre-Vatican II Catholic I’m not, I ran a test to see what color I could make the text before it became a mortal sin (bad contrast). TechSoup uses #666666 for its text so, logically, I tried #555555. I’m a genius. It worked.

Personally, I don’t think #555555 is dark enough to make text really legible. “Legally,” it works, but this is 2009. Black is beautiful. Let’s make black text the new black text. Let’s make our text #000000.

TechSoup