The arrows that indicate that the stats can be expanded on the Place Details page and settings pages are incredibly difficult for me to make out — such that I completely missed them and had to have them pointed out by a friend! As somebody who generally has decent vision, I can imagine that other folks would have an even more difficult time understanding that these elements can be interacted with, the carets are a helpful indicator!
I picked the sRGB values from that screenshot and loaded it into the APCA color contrast calculator (a more accurate spec than the WCAG 2.0 one most folks may be familiar with) and it gave it a score of 0.0… Could be improved!
Yeah, this is a side effect of Arc’s Dark Mode support being tacked on on top of very geriatric UIKit code that wasn’t built to accommodate multiple colour schemes. It’s basically just the Light Mode colour scheme (and icons) but with a slightly darker background color.
In fact that’s exactly what it is! Anything more than that would’ve required significant changes across the entire app’s UI code. And the codebase is already a decade old and showing its age. The technical debt mountain was too high.
Fortunately in the full rebuild for Arc Timeline Editor app I’m getting to do everything with proper modern techniques, SwiftUI, and Dark Mode built in from the start. So the new app has a complete Dark Mode theme, with proper dark background, appropriate font colours and icon colours and all the rest.
If all goes well I should have Arc Timeline Editor in beta some time next month. It’s running happily on my main phone now, and at the point where I’m starting to port over the various main timeline views and item editing views. The bits are falling into place. Fingers crossed I can send out a public beta soon!
