Re: question for you Brits
Its not just Brits - there number of sites everywhere where people think its sensible to use a mix of greyey blue contrasting not with bluey grey (or similar practically monotonic themes) which are deemed by 'designers' to look cool or stylish and yet breach every simple accessibility rule.
One of the joys of the internet is you can normally force your own css onto a page so you can see what the fuck is going on. You need an old colour monitor with access to all the colour contrils to make some UIs U.