Visual28-Personal Blog of Mark Aplet - Design, web, and other topics

I think we all would agree that spammers must die! Okay not literally, but the spam does need to stop. I recently closed down an email address that received over 5,000 junk emails a day. I had the address for the better part of 6 years or more. Part of the spam problem was created when I put my email address online unprotected. This is a common practice still employed today because many webmasters either don't know how to munge an email address or maybe it's just too much work.

I don't believe there is a silver bullet for becoming spam free. However, in the last year or so I have done two things to curb my spam. So far it has worked nearly perfectly. I now only see one or two emails a week that are junk mail.

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I am still amazed when I talk to people about accessibility on the web and their response is typically "Blind people can surf the web?" This says two things. People think of only blind people when discussing accessibility, and second being people assume that if a person has a disability that they should not be using the web. This can't be further from the truth. Because this ignorance still exists, and I still encounter it I thought I would go back and write an accessibility 101 article.

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Back in May, I wrote an article on tips for improving your web design. One small piece of that article discussed converting your design to greyscale so that you can get an idea of your color contrast ratio. Though I believe this is important to do, it is a bit time consuming when your in a design grove, and speed is of importance. Sometimes I just want a quick preview to see where I was going or how I was doing thus far in my process.

I remember seeing an online contrast analyzer and decided to look it up to see what it was about. My search turned up quite a few helpful tools that I just had to share with the rest of you. Before I get to the tools, let me take a minute to explain why we would want tools for testing contrast ratios in our designs.

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