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I recently noticed that the red background highlight behind deleted posts is now a much lighter shade of red than it used to be in the past.

While I'm generally in favor of having higher contrast ratios for text across SE, I think this crosses the line a bit. The previous background was readable to me and didn't pose any contrast ratio issues to me. On the other hand, the new color is less visible than the old one and difficult to see on monitors with higher contrast settings. In other words, the contrast ratio between the red background and the white surroundings is too low.

As a test to see the magnitude of this issue, I tried raising my display contrast. By default, it's set to 20%, but setting it to 40% made it barely visible unless I really squinted at it, and setting it to 50% made it just about invisible. Some users may turn up their monitor's contrast to a higher level to better read text on screen, but this change makes it more difficult for those users who engage in moderation to identify deleted posts, especially if they've scrolled down.

Can we please make the shade of red that appears underneath deleted posts be darker (while still retaining WCAG Level 2 AA compatibility)?

Here's an image of the current configuration:

Too light red color

...and the previous configuration:

Better red color

I hope that this is one of the unintended consequences of the CSS refactor.

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    I suppose the new pink is slightly less visible, if you're in the middle of a long post, and you have a high brightness monitor. But not worth complaining about, IMHO, since the colour transition between deleted posts is visible. I just tested it on my phone at max brightness, with the blue light filter off. With the filter on, the pinkness is still quite visible to my eyes, even at max brightness, but I do have pretty good colour discrimination...
    – PM 2Ring
    Mar 10, 2020 at 10:42
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    @PM2Ring, it depends on your monitor. I've got an IPS monitor and a TN monitor available for side-by-side comparisons, and on the TN one, deleted posts at the bottom of the screen are almost indistinguishable from regular ones. I've gone looking for the "flag for deletion" link on already-deleted posts several times today.
    – Mark
    Mar 10, 2020 at 23:57
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    At least I’m not the only one to notice this reduced clarity. @PM2Ring it is not slightly less visible if you have poor colour vision. It has gone from being clearly visible to virtually invisible.
    – David Buck
    Mar 26, 2020 at 7:27
  • Playing with the brightness and contrast did it for me -- they were actually too low, but not crazily so. Everything looked normal enough to me but the pink was completely invisible.
    – goldilocks
    Jun 22, 2020 at 14:44

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