> When making the contrast of the text lower and lower... designers need
to think of<p>> elderly users with bad vision<p>> low quality monitors<p>> bad lighting and glare<p>> reading on tiny screens<p>And easily pissed off curmudgeons like myself. I immediately hit "No
Styles" at the slightest visual irritation; low contrast is the most
common. I'll do this many times in a day, with a satisfied, grumbled
"harumph."<p>I suppose that I, a mere reader/user, am at the end of the line of
stakeholders, with the purchasing/contracting manager at the front, and
I suppose "oooh" helps get a lot of contracts signed. So good for you, I
wish you well, and it's easy enough to erase all your hard work and go
directly to 1992 black text on white with obvious blue/purple links.<p>You can do this in Firefox as: View/Page Style/No Style.<p>My favorite Firefox addon, making it one click: Disable Style Button <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-style-button/?src=search" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-style...</a><p>I enjoy a nicely styled, pleasant site, but I only read about 80% of
them as-is.
It's a pretty common design meme to "not use pure black" (e.g., <a href="https://ianstormtaylor.com/design-tip-never-use-black/" rel="nofollow">https://ianstormtaylor.com/design-tip-never-use-black/</a>) or "not use pure white".<p>What these designers appear not to realize, is that you are going to be viewing these designs on a light-emitting device, or at least a light-reflecting surface. None of these can actually produce a "pure black" (which would be no light at all) or "pure white". Even NASA only gets close: <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/super-black-material.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/super-black-...</a><p>So designers can say that #000 is too dark, or that #fff is too light, but calling them pure black or pure white, is just inaccurate.
Man, I wish presenters at conferences would learn this.<p>Really, just that they'd learn that the contrast <i>range</i> on their laptop is huge compared to the contrast range on the projector that everyone else is looking at, especially when you're far from the screen.<p>Surprisingly (to me) I saw really-light-blue-text-on-white as well as the hipster-dark-colors-on-black at the last conference I was at. Neither was legible...
This is one of the many reasons I prefer to surf the web through emacs-w3m, in my terminal. All the cute design crap is removed, and I'm given direct access to pure information, functionally displayed. Unfortunately it doesn't work with Javascript, so some sites don't work. But surprisingly many (including HN and Wikipedia) do.
I've still never figured out why Hacker News gradually turns down the contrast when something gets downvoted. It's the worst possible way to represent it. Absolutely frustrating.<p>Even though downvoted comments usually are inflammatory, sometimes I want to read the damn thing so that the rebuttals make sense.<p>And then <i>every</i> Ask HN is low-contrast. Why?
Solarized [1] is a contrast offender. There are things that I like about Solarized especially having a consistent palette across applications. But reducing contrast, especially for comments, leads to eyestrain. His 'content tones' are all reduced contrast with respect to background, between 45-65 L*. And his background black isn't 0 and I'm not sure why.<p>[1] <a href="http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized" rel="nofollow">http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized</a>
My long-standing theory on why this started is because the default brightness/contrast on monitors is usually far too high for the average environment --- they may look great sitting on the (often also brightly-lit) store shelf, but are eye-wateringly unbearable in the typical office or home. Thus designers started reducing contrast in a sort of software workaround to what is actually a hardware problem, and those of us who adjust our displays for more comfortable viewing get unreadably low contrast.<p>My monitors are set to only 12% contrast/10% brightness on one and 20/30 on the (slightly older) other to compensate for wear, and it's plenty enough. It's also probably better for longevity to not be driving the backlight at full intensity.
Good to see the date on this is 2011, because back then low-contrast was a major design trend. These days? It still happens, but it's nothing like it was.
The no contrast movement has hit restaurant menus. Between the lighting and the menu, there is just no hope in reading them if I forget reading glasses.
Despite claiming to promote high contrast text, this website is medium contrast at best. Their "black" text is #191919, not #000000 as it should be. Printer toner and carbon black based inks are frequently darker than #000000 on a typical screen, and nobody complains about them being too dark.<p>In the case of white being darker than #ffffff, you can at least argue that most users have their monitors configured too bright (it's too bright by default because that looks better for a short term comparison, and most people don't change the defaults), so darker whites are compensating for that. There's no good reason to make black text gray.
Yes. What they are saying. Please. Also, print and physical media that's low contrast and/or tiny in size is stupid.<p>Most internet-of-things devices, most BD players, TVs, monitors, etc, I'm looking at you, or at least trying to.<p>Lots of hipster-era print pieces, I'm trying to look at you too.<p>Also, let me throw in the point that blue-on-black, or yellow-on-white, contrast is hostile to the human visual system, especially in low light. The human eyes' lenses have a smaller circle of confusion (optical jargon) for longer wavelength light. Blue emergency lights on cop cars: couldn't be worse for visibility and dark adaption if they tried. Red please!
I find these tools to be really useful in evaluating designs and emphasizing to stakeholders where designs fall according to standards:<p>- <a href="http://www.checkmycolours.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.checkmycolours.com/</a><p>- <a href="https://snook.ca/technical/colour_contrast/colour.html#fg=33FF33,bg=333333" rel="nofollow">https://snook.ca/technical/colour_contrast/colour.html#fg=33...</a><p>---<p>edit: adding extra lines to get proper line breaks
I found this site to hurt my eyes and left me with really bad after images. It's dusk here and I haven't turned the lights on yet, maybe that is why, but I really prefer mild contrast when reading or I end up having striped after images and floaters become very noticeable.<p>Maybe the nice looking sites aren't so bad, and people who disagree can just override the settings (very easy in browsers), like has been possible since windows 3.1.