Reading Time: 2 minutes It has been over a decade when I launched contrast-ratio.com, an app to calculate the WCAG 2.1 contrast ratio between any two CSS colors. At the time, all similar tools suffered from several flaws when being used for CSS editing: Over the years, contrast-ratio.com grew in popularity: it was recommended in several books, talks, and […]

I love the idea and philosophy of Stoicism. In practice, however, it’s bloody difficult to live by after 39 years. Will be working on this going forward.

It has been over a decade when I launched contrast-ratio.com, an app to calculate the WCAG 2.1 contrast ratio between any two CSS colors. At the time, all similar tools suffered from several flaws when being used for CSS editing:

• No support for semi-transparent colors (Since WCAG included no guidance for alpha transparency — I had to do original research to calculate the contrast ratio range for that case)

• No support for color formats other than hex or (at best) RGB with sliders. I wanted something where I could just paste a CSS color just like I had it specified in my code (e.g. hsl(220 10% 90%), possibly tweak it a bit to pass, then paste it back. I didn’t want to use unintuitive hex colors, and I didn’t want to fiddle with sliders.

• Poor UX, often calculating the actual ratio required further user actions, making iteration tedious

Over the years, contrast-ratio.com grew in popularity: it was recommended in several books, talks, and workshops. It basically became the standard URL developers would visit for this purpose.

However, I’ve been too busy to work on it further beyond just merging pull requests. My time is currently split between the dozens of open source projects I have started and maintain, my TAG work, my CSS WG work, and my teaching & research at MIT.

Therefore, when Ross and Drew from Siege Media approached me with a generous offer to buy the domain, and a commitment to take over maintainship of the open source project, I was cautiously optimistic. But now, after having seen some of their plans for it, I could not be more certain that the future of this tool is much brighter with them.

Please join me in welcoming them to the project and help them get settled in as new stewards!

ETA: Siege Media Press Release

It has been over a decade when I launched contrast-ratio.com, an app to calculate the WCAG 2.1 contrast ratio between any two CSS colors. At the time, all similar tools suffered from several flaws when being used for CSS editing:

• No support for semi-transparent colors (Since WCAG included no guidance for alpha transparency — I had to do original research to calculate the contrast ratio range for that case)

• No support for color formats other than hex or (at best) RGB with sliders. I wanted something where I could just paste a CSS color just like I had it specified in my code (e.g. hsl(220 10% 90%), possibly tweak it a bit to pass, then paste it back. I didn’t want to use unintuitive hex colors, and I didn’t want to fiddle with sliders.

• Poor UX, often calculating the actual ratio required further user actions, making iteration tedious

Over the years, contrast-ratio.com grew in popularity: it was recommended in several books, talks, and workshops. It basically became the standard URL developers would visit for this purpose.

However, I’ve been too busy to work on it further beyond just merging pull requests. My time is currently split between the dozens of open source projects I have started and maintain, my TAG work, my CSS WG work, and my teaching & research at MIT.

Therefore, when Ross and Drew from Siege Media approached me with a generous offer to buy the domain, and a commitment to take over maintainship of the open source project, I was cautiously optimistic. But now, after having seen some of their plans for it, I could not be more certain that the future of this tool is much brighter with them.

Please join me in welcoming them to the project and help them get settled in as new stewards!

ETA: Siege Media Press Release

Straight from the Nand Cave and also somewhere else in a cave or maybe outer space comes The CS Primer Show.

Here's episode one, where Oz and I meander around Richard Hamming's excellent talk You And Your Research.

Subscribe to the YouTube channel for future episodes. You can expect a whole lot of Bell Labs content. Also check out Oz's new educational venture CS Primer - it's like having your own personal Aristotle-Oz computer science tutor and I'm loving it!