Plant taxon entries in iNat Observation Fields have started appearing in a combination of pale green type and pale gray type.
My eye skims right past them when I look for an observer’s identification of the plant hosting a gall inducer. The now-colored entries for insects use a more eye-catching red type. Fungi are magenta and mammals bright blue.
This only happens with fields constructed to display taxa with a “clickable” link to each taxon. The link feature is terrific. But the pale green is a problem. It’s the same green used in the word “iNatForum” at the top of this page, but the really small type and the use of gray (not black) type for the scientific name makes it very hard to see.
In my opinion, this isn’t too much of a problem as the observation field itself is bolded. If more people have a problem with this, that’s fine, but green makes the most sense to me as it’s consistent with the rest of the identifying type and icons for plants on the site. Do you propose changing all of the links to a more bold colour (say, black with an underline) or just specifically changing the plant link to a different colour?
I think to make it less confusing they should all be a uniform, easily readable color. Using a different color for plants and not using different colors for other iconic taxa would be more confusing.
I agree that this is hard to see, especially the scientific name. I don’t think that the color matching the text to the iconic taxa has a ton of value here, or at least not enough to offset the issues with readability. I’d just make this a uniform color across taxa or otherwise changing font/style to improve readability.
This 3 year old thread is the only discussion of readability I could find. I would appreciate if the scientific name was the same color and size as the common name. Pale gray is very hard to see.
I use Chrome on a PC on a Dell Precision Workstation. This is a large screen for a laptop. I have good vision. I still have to squint when reading scientific names, especially in taxonomical lists.
If anyone has a workaround that doesn’t involve changing my PC settings just for iNat, or increasing Chrome’s zoom (which makes features disappear), please advise.
For those who don’t know, here is a quick explanation about contrast and color requirements in Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2: https://webaim.org/articles/contrast/
