When Fancy Breaks Accessibility

So I was browsing through Linkedin (I know, it’s a terrible habit) when I came across a post about an LLM that I wanted to have a look at (hush).

So I clicked on the link and was taken to a page that was very flashy. On the surface of it, there was nothing to write home about design wise. It was more brochure ware than anything else, with all of the deep dive goodness contained in links off to their github and huggingface repos. All well and good.

Except I couldn’t find my mouse pointer.

Now I wear glasses but I’m not vision impaired beyond things being fuzzy on the screen and getting headaches if I don’t wear them for too long. I also have a big screen and yes sometimes I lose the pointer if the screen is particularly busy, but not this time.

No this time I couldn’t find the pointer because whoever had designed the site decided that what it really needed was a custom pointer. Not only a custom pointer, but a custom pointer that blended into the majority background of the site.

I’ve posted a screen shot in the feature image of this post, if you can’t find the pointer I’ve put a description into the image alt text and I’ve enlarged the actual pointer below

As you can see, it’s very fancy, and very hard to see.

I’m going to contact the site owners, but can we please make sure that if we go fancy, that it’s accessible fancy?