Since some months ago, my preferred color scheme is white/light text over black/dark background, so I changed everything to match that. The XFCE theme, the color settings for claws-mail, and Firefox default colors.

The last one opened the Pandora's Box. I picked white text, yellow for new links, lime for visited ones, and a black background, instead of the predefault dark over light combination.

Accordingly to the specifications, this should work. There's also a W3C QA Tip about colors.

But, actually, there are lots of sites rendering unusable. Fortunately, some of the affected sites have good webmasters and admins: issues with Mozillazine and Gentoo websites were fixed after being reported.

But the world isn't perfect and there are sites which, having been warned about the issue, weren't fixed. I am also keeping a list of the broken sites I browse so I can report the issues when possible.

At the moment, one of the most annoying issues is with Google. Not the search engine, that's one of the two Google sites without troubles.

I checked Groups, Calendar, Orkut, GMail and Docs&Spreadsheets. All of them have issues with colors not being set. I've also posted a message I can't read because of this, at the "Is Something Broken" Google forum: Colors @ groups.google.com and other Google pages.

A message like this one was sent to webmaster@google.com, but I've got no reply to any of the messages, maybe I've to browse the (unreadable) google help pages so I can find a better way to expose the issue.

Another example is SAPO, a portuguese site, which didn't react to the report (it was just forwarded to the involved department).

It seems it's needed to add a step after "check your page with two or more browsers", the "check it with a different color scheme"...

In the Digital Literacy homepage, you can read:

"(...) a Microsoft (...) disponibiliza a todos os cidadãos o Curriculum Microsoft Literacia Digital."

Which translates as "(...) Microsoft (...) makes the Microsoft Digital Literacy Curriculum available to every citizen". It's just another collaboration between the portuguese government and Microsoft.

The interesting part is that the government wants to make this part of the basic education. Okay, so let's have a look at it.

On the main page, you have two green buttons. I click on the one which says Iniciar este curso (Start this course). And here's a translation of what I get

There is no updated version of Microsoft Internet Explorer on this computer. If you don't install Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 SP1 or later, the viewer may not work correctly. To get more information about Microsoft Internet Explorer, visite http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie. f you are installing this product through a network server, contact the system administrator.

Using an IE User Agent just gives me a white page.

Fortunately, I'm able to click "Iniciar Avaliação" (Start Evaluation) and get a working web page. Then I did the same thing in the page I got (there was another button with the same text). A new window is opened, with a multiple choice question. When I try to validate my answer and get the next question ("Seguinte", Next), I get another beautiful message:

We're sorry, but we were unable to service your request. You may wish to choose from the links below for information about Microsoft products and services.