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I was hesitating about posting this since it's a very minor thing, but here it goes.

Something didn't look right about the SO design today, and after cheching with the Wayback Machine, my suspicions were confirmed.

The font color for tag labels was changed to a ligher one.

Is it just me, or the tags are a lot harder to read now?

I suggest changing the color back to the darker one.

Old color:

old

New color:

new

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    I wasn't able to see a change unless I looked really close because I have ClearType (font smoothing) enabled. That said, it does represent an accessibility issue.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Dec 11, 2019 at 23:34
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    Not the same thing, but another change that occurred at the same time is that the green reputation alerts in the topbar are now noticeably paler.
    – CertainPerformance
    Dec 11, 2019 at 23:43
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    @CertainPerformance I've just noticed that too. Also the yellow background color of block quotes (and of questions with watched tags) is now darker and more reddish (this one looks better, imho).
    – HolyBlackCat
    Dec 11, 2019 at 23:52
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    I mentioned this in the edit, but accessibility problems, especially those that the WCAG AA level, are bugs and not enhancements.
    – mpdonadio
    Dec 12, 2019 at 14:23

2 Answers 2

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I’ve added some more contrast back to these tags. On the Stacks side of things, we’ve changed some color values and we needed to compensate here. Thanks for finding it and pointing it out!

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It looks like the foreground color is #5b8db1 and the background color is #e1ecf4. Using the WebAIM Contrast Checker, the contrast is 2.97:1.

The minimum AA contrast is 4.5:1 and AAA is 7:1, so this is a definite accessibility problem.

The Chrome WAVE plugin also shows this as an error.

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    Devs: If you change this, can you also change the rep notification. It also has a very low ratio and strains my eyes.
    – NathanOliver
    Dec 12, 2019 at 21:30
  • The new rep notification (white on #5eba7d) has a contrast of 2.38, which is even worse.
    – CertainPerformance
    Dec 14, 2019 at 4:10

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