My vision is no longer good, and I need all the help that I can get if I want to read. Look at the top of this page. At the right-hand end of the yellow band, there are 3 symbols in white or pale blue. This produces a contrast so faint that, though I can just see that there are symbols there, I cannot tell what they are. When I steer the mouse-pointer over them, however, the drop-down menu uses black text on white, and I can read that, even though the print is very small. Weak contrasts may seem new and stylish, but the point of the website is to convey information,not to create an impression of elegance. The best contrast of all is white text on black, and the next best is black text on white. Please, PLEASE stick to that. This does not only apply to images and text. A helpful member of the forum gave me the perfect answer to my previous post, and this took me to the web-page at which to use the ‘Ignore’-procedure for words that one already knows. If you look at that page, you will see that the tick-boxes use an outline so faint as almost to make the tick-boxes invisible. There is no need for this, the software used in creating the tick-boxes will allow them to be as distinct as the designer cares to make them. For me, the tick-boxes were so faint that, instead of trying to see them I resorted to zigzagging the mouse-pointer where I thought that they might be until it changed to a hand with a pointing finger. Very time-consuming. Next, text-size. In my course – which is excellent, by the way – the software sometimes gives me an English word, and asks me to translate it. If I get the translation right, there is no difficulty. However, if I get it wrong, I have no means of knowing what my error was, because the text at the bottom of the page telling me that I have erred and showing what error I have made, is in text so tiny that I cannot read a single letter of it. Why is it so small ? There is plenty of room for bigger text, and that would make an important improvement in the value of the course to me,
I reported the same problem almost three years ago, but nobody from Memrise ever bothered to respond.
In addition, this issue has been raised upstream, at the Discourse site itself, because the stock installation of discourse has the same problems. The response of the creator of Discourse was, in essence, that accessibility is not a priority for him or his team, and if accessibility is an important factor for your company or site, then you shouldn’t use Discourse as-is.
However, I don’t believe that there is anything that prevents a company like Memrise from customizing the UI, to make it accessible to visually impaired users, if they wish to do so, and I find it rather surprising that a company that pays so much lip service to valuing diversity and inclusion would not have done so already.
I am grateful to all of you that have replied, even if there is no positive result available. I have already cancelled my subscription to Duolingo (Greek) for this reason, and in a few weeks shall doubtless need to do the same with my subscription to Memrise (Arabic) for the same reason. It does seem to me extraordinary – and I do speak as someone that has designed and managed websites – that an activity as fatuously simple as web-page design keeps defeating Memrise.