Redefining Stack Overflow's Colors

Overview
Redefining Stack Overflow's colors was our first step in creating a more accessible Stack Overflow. By making our site more accessible, we are ensuring that all users have equal access and ability to participate in and learn from Stack Overflow.
My ROLE
As Director of Product design, I owned the strategy, communicated with the community, managed the work, and organized feedback sessions.
BackGROUND
Stack Overflow for Teams has pledged to its clients to work towards earning a WCAG 2.1 AA certification. In effort to do this, the design guild started tackling elements that failed according to a Deque audit. While working on these items, the team ran into blocker around colors, legacy code, and more. After seeing the team struggle, I stopped the work and reorganized our efforts. This started by redefining the colors and color stops within Stacks, the Stack Overflow design system.
HypOthesis
We believe that investing in the accessibility of Stack Overflow will help fulfill our mission to empower the world to develop technology through collective knowledge
WHY
By making our site more accessible, we are ensuring that all users have equal access and ability to participate in and learn from Stack Overflow—this is core to our mission of empowering the world to develop technology through collective knowledge. Many customers have also placed accessibility as a gatekeeper to renewals. By creating a more accessible site, we will open ourselves to a wider audience and create more opportunity for our advertisers, talent customers, and collectives as well.
Results
Still being developed, we leaned into APCA after reading research and hearing from our community on what contrast calculation method they trusted the most.
We were able to reduce the number of blue palettes from four to one as well as fix more technical problems such as ensuring all colors of the same level could be used for the same purpose. An example of this would be if black-700 could be used for copy in light mode, but not dark mode. Our CTA copy will shift from normal to bold weight in another effort to be more accessible. We are excited to complete this step and be a better partner to those with visual impairments.