The footer text is now dark enough to read

Our footer appears at the bottom of every page on the site, and two things in it were too light to read comfortably: the links themselves, and the large line of text under our logo. Against a white background, that line in particular was well below the minimum contrast the accessibility standard asks for — noticeably faint if you have low vision, or if you are reading on a phone in daylight.

Both are now darker. The links keep the same slate-blue character, just enough deeper to clear the 4.5-to-1 contrast ratio required of ordinary text. The large line under the logo is darker too, comfortably past the 3-to-1 ratio that applies to text at its size, while staying lighter than the links so the footer still reads as a hierarchy rather than a wall.

Small as that sounds, it was most of a problem we could not see. A browser-based check we added this week measured every page for contrast and found 393 failures across the site — and 318 of them were this one footer, simply because it is on every page. Two colour values fixed 81% of the total.

The reason it went unnoticed for so long is worth saying plainly: we already had an automated test for our colour palette, and it passed. It checked the colours we use for buttons and body text and never checked the footer at all. That gap is now closed — the footer colours are tested on every deploy, at the specific contrast ratio each one needs for the size it is printed at.