[IxDA Discuss] Guidance for CRT vs. LCD screens

[Jim Drew]

I ran into an unusual issue over the weekend, on a simple site I put together for an annual community event.  Set on a black background, access to the different pages if by clicking on graphic buttons ("About", "Events", etc.).  The active page has the graphic bright and underlined, with the other buttons "dimmed" to about half opacity.  Elsewhere, the linked text was a medium-to-dark green, embedded in medium gray text.

On the various LCD screens I use, this was completely visible.  The linked text popped out wonderfully.  At worst, you might have to look a little harder to read the dimmed buttons (although I never thought so; they were clear to me), but seeing that they were there was no problem.

But it turns out that users on CRT screens had only dim/dark green for the linked text -- no easy to see against the black background -- and the graphic buttons for the other pages was 100% invisible.  (I saw this for myself.)  One person (on an eMac, I think) didn't even realize the site had other pages; another found the buttons because of the tooltips (which didn't show in Safari for the first user) and a layout which informed her that other buttons must be present.

This shocked the heck out of me, needless to say.

Other than "make things brighter and avoid dark backgrounds altogether", are there other guidelines that I can keep in mind to avoid this sort of issue in the future?  And maybe brightness/contrast settings I can save for viewing such sites on an LCD to better mimic what CRT users will see?

-- Jim