Amy
You are quite right not to like this idea.
In particular, greyed-out items I have seen rarely pass the WCAG accessibility compliance for color contrast. They are almost always too light, since even #777 does not pass the minimum contrast required (example and nice discussion here: https://webaim.org/articles/contrast/).
In general, the semantic use of color as the ONLY mechanism to convey information is a basic accessibility error to be avoided. Here's the official statement: "Color is not used as the only visual means of conveying information, indicating an action, prompting a response, or distinguishing a visual element." from the W3C document: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/#use-of-color.
You will notice that some places in Moodle that used to have only grey-out colors to indicate hidden or other items (eg the dimmed style class), have been updated in recent versions so that they have additional text indicators to show status in addition to color; for instance, course activity items that are hidden or stealth hidden from students now do this, which is an important improvement and good practice to model.
Randy
You are quite right not to like this idea.
In particular, greyed-out items I have seen rarely pass the WCAG accessibility compliance for color contrast. They are almost always too light, since even #777 does not pass the minimum contrast required (example and nice discussion here: https://webaim.org/articles/contrast/).
In general, the semantic use of color as the ONLY mechanism to convey information is a basic accessibility error to be avoided. Here's the official statement: "Color is not used as the only visual means of conveying information, indicating an action, prompting a response, or distinguishing a visual element." from the W3C document: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/#use-of-color.
You will notice that some places in Moodle that used to have only grey-out colors to indicate hidden or other items (eg the dimmed style class), have been updated in recent versions so that they have additional text indicators to show status in addition to color; for instance, course activity items that are hidden or stealth hidden from students now do this, which is an important improvement and good practice to model.
Randy