My boss kept saying my gray text was fine, then I checked it against WCAG
He was looking at it on a $1,200 monitor in a bright office. I ran it through a contrast checker and got 2.8:1, which fails even the big text rule. Do we trust our eyes or the numbers, and which one do you go with when a client says their brand color has to stay?
Read a thing a while back about how contrast ratios came from actual research on how well people can read text, not just someone's opinion. Your boss's fancy monitor probably has better brightness and color than 90% of the screens your users are staring at. Trust the numbers because the numbers don't care about your office lighting. When a client digs in on their brand color, I'd show them the failing score and then offer a darker or lighter shade of that same color that still passes. Nine times out of ten they never even notice the difference once it's on the page. Their brand can stay, it just needs a tweak so actual humans can read it.