On delivery I noticed they had a green box with white text. The green was mottled and graduated and became yellow in places. It was obvious to me, with my reasonably good eyesight, that white text is not easy to read when on a yellow-ish background (it doesn't really take a genius or a blind-man to figure that one out now, does it?). So the Marketing team sent the image back to the agency and requested a new one.
The new one was much better. I could definitely read it. Just to be sure I ran the colours through an online colour contrast analyser. The difference in colour and brightness was still not quite enough to meet the Priority 2 WCAG checkpoint 2.2 regarding colour contrast. However, it was pretty close so I left it up to the Marketing team to determine whether they were happy with it.
They weren't.
The agency sent another image along with the following comment:
"The algorithms are a useful guide to ensuring sufficient contrast and colour difference, but the precise thresholds are somewhat arbitrarily chosen (strange that the human eye works in such neat numbers, 125 and 500 ;)"Isn't this a bit like saying:
"Hmm, it's a bit strange that water just happens to boil at exactly 100°C, isn't it?"or
"How perculiar that 1 Litre of water weighs exactly 1 kilogram."or
"Strange, don't you think, that a day is exactly 24 hours long?"Well, I've got news for you Mr Smarty-pants-Multi-media-degree-don't-you-know-Ad-agency-man, a day isn't exactly 24 hours long. We make it that long so that it's easy to measure. Water only boils at 100°C because we decided that would be a good way of measuring temperature. Time is arbitrary, everything humans measure with is arbitrary. Don't you think perhaps they decided that 125 and 500 were nice, round, easy numbers to remember and developed algorithms accordingly? Dear me...
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