Crossposted from https://europe.pub/post/9269750

A utility bill came on paper using:

• black text (on a variety of different backgrounds- white, orange, gray..)
• white text (on a variety of different backgrounds- blue, green..)
• very light grey text (on a variety of different backgrounds- white, intermittent light green imagery..)
• blue text (on a variety of different backgrounds- white, intermittent light green imagery..)
• 2 kinds of bold text (extra heavy black and dark green)

I’m not blind. I can see it just fine. But when I try to scan this thing into a bi-level doc, it’s impossible because of this shit-show of color combinations. There is no possible level by which all the text can be made clear. As soon as a level is used to eliminate the colored backgrounds, a lot of the light gray text goes white. This forces me to scan it as color, which wastes file space.

So I thought-- what about blind people? Aren’t they fucked in this situation? If I were blind, I would scan, OCR, then use a screen reader on the text. Some OCR tools can work on color docs but I don’t think all OCR software has that.

Reaching the accessibility law is itself a shitshow in the EU now that the EU blocks Tor. Indeed, only clearnet users are permitted to be aware of the law. I had to pull directive 2019/882 from the archives, where the most recent capture was bad but an old capture was fetchable.

Directive 2019/882 seems to only address “products and services”, and documentation for that commercial category. I see nothing about paper bills. That seems bizarre, no?

I found this Color Contrast for PDF Accessibility: Why Does It Matter?, but that’s not exactly relevant.

So is the utility company legally compliant with this shitty unscannable invoice design?