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Forgot the alpha channel on my dark theme, shipped gray text on a gray card to 2,000 users
Pushed a new dark mode card design to production last Tuesday around 6pm and didn't catch that my body text was sitting at a 2.1:1 contrast ratio until a user in Portland emailed me a screenshot. I had tested it on my own monitor where the gray looked fine, but on her older phone the card background and the text blended into one blob. Ended up pulling the release 4 hours later and redoing the palette so the text sits at 7:1 against the card. Now I run every single color pair through a checker before it touches the repo. Does anyone keep a fixed set of test colors, or do you just check whatever ships?
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olivia_barnes971d ago
Wouldn't it help to keep a few pairs you know are brutal and test those every time? Like light gray on white, dark gray on black, that kind of thing. Your Portland user basically found the worst case for you, so why not bake that case into your checks so it never sneaks past again. Building a fixed set of edge cases sounds way better than just eyeballing whatever happens to be in the file that day. That way you catch the ugly stuff before it hits 2,000 phones, not after some poor person emails you a screenshot. A saved palette of problem colors plus a checker would've saved you that 4 hour rollback.
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