This one simple 600-year-old trick makes your website more accessible - Nick Piesco at !!Con

‘Accessibility and the Web’ sounds like a thoroughly modern set of challenges, but it includes problems that people have been trying to solve for hundreds of years.

In mediæval times, a knight being able to recognise a friend or foe at a distance was a matter of life and death. Rules evolved around the coats of arms they bore to make identifying each other easier, giving birth to the science of heraldry. The most important one of those rules is around colour contrast.

My buddy Nick Piesco talks about why colour contrast is so important to accessibility, and he takes us on a whirlwind tour through the history of heraldry before showing how rules that originated on the tournament ground inform our best practices here in the 21st century.

This is a shorter version of Nick’s talk. The slides for the full talk are on Speaker Deck.