The last of the too-light text is now dark enough to read

This finishes a piece of work we started last week. We pointed a real browser at twelve of our busiest pages and had it measure every colour pairing against the WCAG AA readability standard. Twenty-three pairings failed. The footer accounted for most of them, small labels and badges for the next batch, and this is the remainder.

Nine shades of quiet grey turn up across the career map, critique, events, evidence, the help centre, the job tracker, learning, news, podcasts, portfolios, projects and Skill Labs. They are the colours used for dates, captions, helper text and secondary labels — the text that is meant to sit back from the main content, which is exactly why nobody had ever checked it. Each one is a little darker now, and each keeps its own shade rather than being flattened into one shared grey, so these pages still read the way they were designed to.

One case had to work the other way round. A green used as a background behind white text was the least readable pairing anywhere on the site, and white text cannot be darkened — so the green itself is deeper instead.

None of this changes what any page says or where anything sits. It only makes the quieter text legible for people reading on a dim screen, in bright sunlight, or with low vision.