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Contrast Rebellion

contrastrebellion.com

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Re: Contrast Rebellion

#11

Post by kps »

This site flips between dark-on-light and light-on-dark, at least one of which is a visual encumbrance to some people — see ‘astigmatic halation’ — and the other of which may well be to others. (In my experience, switching between the two, as too many sites do for code display, is the worst.)

If you're not using browser default colors, respect `@prefers-color-scheme`.

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#15

Post by jdthedisciple »

doodlesdev wrote: post #2

It would be nice since they are advocating for readable text if the font sizes were appropriate on mobile. Even funnier is that lighthouse shows a multitude of accessibility problems in the page including.... low contrast. https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-contrastrebellion-c... Apparently the reason for the awful sizing on mobile is missing the responsive viewport meta tag... IDK, I agree with the content of…

Agreed, this site was a rather unpleasant experience to read and contrast was certainly among the issues for me as well.

How ironic.

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#17

Post by wildrhythms »

nahuel0x wrote: post #9

Not only text... take Whatsapp, used by all people with a cellphone in the world, whose sent and read check marks are distinguished only by a subtle change of color instead of having different icons.

I work with graphic/UI designers and I have to be the one to advocate for using more than color to differentiate states, and to meet acceptable contrast ratios. And don't get me started on hiding things behind hard to discover hover states. The managers who are supposed to oversee the development of these products don't give a shit about accessibility. Sad state of affairs.

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#19

Post by ZoomZoomZoom »

For paper you'd like the maximum contrast, but screens emit light, and maximum contrast puts additional strain on the eyes. There's a big but, though. This is for people with normal eyesight. As far as I understand, some people require this hurtful (to me) level of contrast just to be able to read. Additionally, you can significantly lower contrast just adjusting your monitor's brightness, but there's a limit on how far can you go in the opposite direction and it doesn't help if there's not enough contrast to begin with.

If you can't solve it with CSS presets, I think it's better to stick with higher contrast for these reasons. For my blog I just use black-on-white, even though for me personally it's too much if it's more than just a couple of paragraphs. I tend to lower my display brightness while checking my own blog. :)

Another nuance I don't see discussed is at least not keeping the empty background around the content div at the maximum value level. It's just emitting pure light around the main content for no use.

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#20

Post by kentonv »

Weirdly, this site uses `color: #1b1b1b` instead of black.

Why? The difference is barely noticeable, but black provides more contrast and IMO looks better than #1b1b1b.

I've seen many designers assert that being slightly off-black is "better" for some reason, but isn't this the same argument that eventually leads to low-contrast designs? Why is a little bit of contrast reduction good, but a lot is bad? Pure black always looks (slightly) better to me (I commonly open the inspector and toggle the color to test this). And anyway, the variation in people's monitor settings is probably much wider than the difference between #1b1b1b and black, so what is even the point? Why waste brainpower trying to decide exactly how much contrast reduction is good, and risk going too far for some people while creating an imperceptible difference for others?

(To be clear, if it's not obvious, I'm a big fan of this site's message... but apparently I'd go even further.)

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