Note: The color-coding is likely to change in future Chrome releases. <-- Well, someone eventually found out that some people cannot distinguish red and green, but it was too late :-D
I am a little surprised to find such an issue in Google software as it is a topic for first semester CS undergraduates ;-)
I learned it in both my computer graphics course and my user-interaction design course as part of my CS degree (German university). None of these courses are required, but they are popular enough that the most important lessons were pretty universal knowledge among students.
I taught a ton of a11y stuff in my intro to web classes. Even did screen reader demos. I wasn't the only one. There are lots of folks teaching this stuff. Not a critical mass, but I'm so thankful it's happening. :)
If it was actually part of the curriculum I sure hope that it was in some design centered elective class. IMO if your CS degree spent time teaching that as part of the core curriculum, they missed an opportunity to put more Math, PL theory, and interesting algorithms in there, because there's more than can be sanely covered in any one curriculum.
Since it's accessibility based, it's more laudable than teaching CS students how to center a div, but it's not like it really requires a mentor of some sort to express the nuances of, right? Or even if it does, it's still design.
It's some years now, and there were at least two courses in which it could have been. The one was elected, HCI. The other was not, it was an introduction into graphics and audio, and since you need to understand basics of human perception to understand compression in that area (jpg, mp3), they talked about stuff like that.
A good CS degree definitely has the space to teach some basics in that area. To mention Gestaltgesetze, to explain human perception a bit, and give an introduction into usability. You do not get a useful developer in the end otherwise
Seen the same on maps where green is a good route and red is a dangerous route. Switched to a blue -> light blue -> yellow -> orange -> red -> black scale with great success. I also believe chemistry uses blue to mean safe, not green.
Even more off topic, but after Firefox (before Chrome) had introduced this feature in dev tools, they also recently introduced it as extension (and it might even work on Chrome)
That's interesting! Do you know if it is possible to access this data from an extension? I would love an extension that crawls through the website and combines the data for all pages.
I am a little surprised to find such an issue in Google software as it is a topic for first semester CS undergraduates ;-)