TRCREATIVE: Weekly Platform News: Contrast Ratio Range, replaceAll Method, Native File System API

Thursday 21 November 2019

Weekly Platform News: Contrast Ratio Range, replaceAll Method, Native File System API

In this week's roundup: Firefox's new contrast checker, a simpler way to lasso substrings in a string, and a new experimental API that will let apps fiddle with a user's local files.

Firefox shows the contrast ratio range for text on a multicolored background

According to Success Criterion 1.4.3 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), text should have a contrast ratio of at least 4.5. (A lower contrast ratio is acceptable only if the text is 24px or larger.)

If the background of the text is not a solid color but a color gradient or photograph, you can use the special element picker in Firefox’s Accessibility panel to get a range of contrast ratios based on the element’s actual background.

(via Šime Vidas)

Replacing all instances of a substring in a string

The new JavaScript replaceAll method makes it easier to replace all instances of a substring in a string without having to convert the substring to a regex first, which is “hard to get right since JavaScript doesn’t offer a built-in mechanism to escape regular expression patterns.”

// BEFORE
str = str.replace(/foo/g, "bar");

// AFTER
str = str.replaceAll("foo", "bar");

This new string method has not yet shipped in browsers, but you can start using it today via Babel (since it’s automatically polyfilled by @babel/preset-env).

(via Mathias Bynens)

Try out the Native File System API in Chrome

The Native File System API, which is experimentally supported in Chrome, allows web apps to read or save changes directly to local files on the person’s computer. The app is granted permission to view and edit files in a specific folder via two separate prompts.