Yellow text showing up on website, but hard to troubleshoot

Question

We have gotten several emails and phone calls about yellow text appearing on our webpages at http://www.ciu.edu.

We are specifically using a black text in the stylesheet. It is on a tan background.

One person claimed to be color blind and I have tried various tests for colorblindness, but no such luck.

We are at a loss as to what is going on. A yellow text on a tan background would be hard to read, but how to troubleshoot, is the problem.

Answer 1

Something Bob Kaufman suggested sparked me to download the IE Superpreview from Microsoft. I ran the IE6 view and immediately got my answer. We have basically dumped support of IE6 and had not even tested for it when launching the new website.

The styling of our notification to IE6 users is causing the yellow text on the rest of the pages.

In addition, there was an improper closing of a font tag. Why there was a font tag, I don't know. I didn't write the notice. It was a notice to users of IE less than IE7. At any rate, the problem is now solved, and rewritten in xhtml standard code.

Answer 2

Can you get a screen grab from one of the users? Being able to confine the problem to a particular OS and browser might also be helpful. Inquire as to these as well, then let us know.

You do have a small IE-only stylesheet that loads, however that contains the usual IE kludges, so I wouldn't be concerned.

Answer 3

If you have access to Mozilla Firefox, you could install the Web Developer Toolbar Add-On to disable stylesheets and/or images to help you hunt down the problem. I had a quick look myself but with images disabled, your images which also act as hyperlinks are showing blue underline (standard link style) hyperlinks. You might also benefit from install Firebug into Firefox too as you can disable individual styles using its inspector.

Answer 4

Have you tried what the page looks like without the CSS loaded, or without some of the background images?

I see some really huge image files on the page. With a slower connection those would take several minutes to load. If the huge image loads before the CSS or the background images, the page might look pretty bad, and noone is not likely to wait for several minutes for everything to load.

You should create images at the size that they are displayed, so they are perhaps 30 kilobyte instead of three megabyte.