[whatwg] Google Feedback on the HTML5 media a11y specifications

[Tab Atkins Jr.]

On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 3:45 PM, Glenn Maynard <glenn at zewt.org> wrote:
> As an aside: the font stroke (the outline around each letter) in the above
> clip helps readability substantially.  A solid font color always tends to
> blend into the background in places, where a two-color stroked font provides
> its own contrast.  I've used the same thing in game UIs rendered on top of a
> moving background.  Tangental, but I figured I'd point it out.

Right now, the WebVTT spec handles this by writing the text in white
on top of a partially-transparent black background.  The text thus
never has contrast troubles, at the cost of a dark block covering up
part of the display.

Stroking text is easy, though.  Webkit has an experimental property
for doing it directly.  Using existing CSS, it's easy to adapt
text-shadow to produce a good outline - just make four shadows, offset
by 1px in each direction, and you're good.

~TJ