Hi,

Is my site easy to read or should I go with a black background and white text and hyperlinks?

I am considering hiring a sighted web designer to perk up the look of my site. If I do so, will the search engines penalize me for having duplicate pages (ones designed for sighted visitors and ones designed for blind & low vision ones)?

thanks

To be perfectly honest, the text colour is the least of the problems.

The text overlays each other if you increase the font size, important for partially sighted visitors.
Any half decent developer who understands accessibility should be able to create a single set of pages that cover ALL the needs of blind and partially sighted without the need for creating multiple versions of the pages.

Yeah what chris said is true, its a pretty straight forward change to your website, a simple set of CSS documents with accesabilty buttons such as [Normal] [High Contrast] [Large Text] ect which load a fresh CSS template to change the apperence of your website would mean you only need a single set of pages to cover all the different versions of the website.

Plus it could also be scripted to write which version they are using to a cookie which would keep the correct style applied throughout the pages.

It's not too much of a big job so most designers/developers shouldnt charge too much for this service as you already have your website content ready.

Originally Posted by USGreenLiving

Is my site easy to read or should I go with a black background and white text and hyperlinks?

Always always always make linked text a contrasting colour to non-link text, and preferably keep the default underlining unless it's fully obvious, ie as part of a navigation bar.