This looks possibly WAI, although I thought background text was supposed to be #5f6368 and that looks a little lighter (hard to tell with the AA).

The background tab text contrast ratio is supposed to be around 4.61, while the old ratio was closer to 9.8.  So it's definitely less contrasty, but still above a11y minimums.

+bettes to be sure the color looks right here.

How about the text for the active tab though? There's quite a difference there too

Tested the issue on chrome reported version# 69.0.3497.23 using Windows 10 and observations are as follows: From the chrome version# 69.0.3473.0 when the material refresh made as default seen the same behaviour as shown in screenshot in comment# 0. Please find the attached screenshot for your reference.

@bettes: Please find the screenshot and above information provide your inputs on it.

Thanks!

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A Gentle Ping..

bettes@ Request you to check comment #4 and provide an update on this issue.

Thanks..

For what it's worth, I have no vision issues and I find it harder to see the text in Refresh

As per comment #4 and #5, adding 'TE-NeedsTriageHelp' label and requesting the appropriate Dev team to look into this issue and help further.

Thanks..

So is this a bug? My system is at 175% system scaling, maybe that's behind the bug? The screenshots in comment #4 look more contrasty than my screenshot so I think this is a bug

Duplicate? https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=880513

***Mass UI Triage***

Closing the issue, if you feel this issue should still be addressed, feel free to reopen it or to file a new issue.

This issue hasn't been addressed yet. The low contrast combined with the thin font weight is quite a difference compared to Edge and Firefox

Here's a comparison of the tab text in Chrome, Firefox and Edge on my laptop. Please don't ignore this :( 

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In your screenshot, background tabs are grey 700 (#5f6368) on #dee1e6, for a contrast ratio of 4.61, and the foreground is grey 800 (#3c4043) on white, for a contrast ratio of 10.46.  Both of those are the designed color ratios and meet WCAG AA minimums.

I don't think the font rendering is actually different than Firefox/Edge -- the lighter color just antialiases differently.  I don't see bugs there.

So for now this is effectively working as intended.  I have raised (again) the issue of Chrome's low contrast compared to our competitors on our internal discussion channel.  I'd love to see movement here, but it's not my call.  "WontFix" looks like the correct resolution to me, for now.

Thank you for raising this issue internally. Just curious though, was there a stated reason for lowering the contrast so much?