URL bar text accessibility issue

Steel Contributor

A supposed security feature all browsers have now is de-emphasized text for portions of the URL in the URL bar. There are 2 different accessibility problems with this though:

 

1) For users with vision issues, the contrast ratio of the de-emphasized portions is too low.

 

2) There is a condition some people have where the text being different shades makes it very hard to recognize/read or 'follow' the URL (I don't recall the name of the condition but I believe it's similar to dyslexia? Someone who suffers from it mentioned it in the chromium bug for this issue but I can't find it :( )

 

Seeing as there are at least 2 accessibility issues with this "security feature", there should be a way to turn this off. Firefox has a flag to turn it off ( browser.urlbar.formatting in about:config), screenshot comparison of what it looks like enabled/disabled.

 

As usual, the Chrome team dismissed the accessibility issues with this and users are stuck with it :( I don't even think there is a flag! Since Microsoft takes accessibility seriously, please consider this! urlbartext.png

0 Replies