So traveling with Avanti tomorrow and get a "your traveling with us tomorrow" reminder email and it comes with this absolutely terrible to read block of text regarding Euston platform timings, seriously who chose this to be yellow on white when literally nothing else is that colour in the email?
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Terrible UX from Avanti email
- Thread starter popeter45
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DarloRich
Veteran Member
Awful - have you contacted them to suggest changes?
Not yet as only just got the email, will tweet them this
DarloRich
Veteran Member
i cant even SEE the text let alone read it. Must be a fault. It is less than accessible!
I can see it but it almost hurts my eyes reading it...
That sort of thing often happens with poor implementations of dark mode in email clients, where the client overrides the chosen text colour.
If you're using an email client in dark mode, it may not be avanti's fault it's displayed like that.
If you're using an email client in dark mode, it may not be avanti's fault it's displayed like that.
AlterEgo
Veteran Member
I've had this same email two days ago and the text is actually in a dark (black, possibly) font and is perfectly readable. Inclined to also think this is an issue with the OP's email client rather than Avanti.
Trainfan2019
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What does UX mean please? I'm not very good with abbreviations on here apart from the obvious ones to me. Thanks.
AlterEgo
Veteran Member
User eXperience. It's not a forum specific abbreviation.
Trainfan2019
Member
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Ah thanks for the explanation about UX.
yea checked on light mode and that worked but really they should have designed this to work on both with a static colour rather than dynamic based on light/dark mode hence bad UX rather than bad UI
That's the thing - they probably did design this to be a static colour - only your email client has piped up and decided you don't want that dark text being displayed on a dark background, so overridden it and made it light.
There are a few ways to to try and work around it, sadly the most reliable is to convert to an image, which brings a whole load of accessibility and potentially privacy concerns - pretty much everything else is a war between the people creating emails and the people creating email clients, with the battle lines drawn by users complaining that the wrong colour was displayed in the wrong context. While there is now CSS functionality for detecting dark mode, this is often stripped / ignored / unsupported by the renderers used in email clients, so even the thing designed to prevent the issue is useless in an email context.
My hypothesis here is that the programmer has not specified the text colour, assuming that the browser’s/email client’s default text colour will always be black. It will be easily fixable by explicitly specifying the text colour in the yellow box such that it’s *always* black. (Better still, provide an alternate dark mode colour scheme using media queries.)
tl;dr: it is absolutely on Avanti to fix. OP, please report it. Dark mode has been available on the two main mobile platforms since 2019, and many people rely on it as an accessibility feature. It’s also not a complex fix—media queries that allow for dark mode specific colour schemes have been part of the CSS standard for over two years. It just requires someone to bother to do it.
LNW-GW Joint
Veteran Member
Almost as bad as the railway abbreviation UTX - under track crossing.
Adam Williams
Established Member
To be fair, whilst you're completely right about the CSS WG spec and support on the web, the support for this media query in email clients is far from universal: https://www.caniemail.com/search/?s=Prefers
You could say this about a lot of CSS features though!
The email client could be overriding it to try and force a message into dark mode.
true, I guess the way to find out would be to check the source of the email and see what rules are set on that particular text. (I’m personally willing to bet it’s relying on the default text colour and not defining that it must be black, but I might be wrong)
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When I first saw the thread title I wondered if it was going to mean unexploded. I've never seen "UX" before except in UXB.
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