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Contrast Rebellion

contrastrebellion.com

101–110 of 151 posts

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#101

I'm always amused by HackerNews being presented as this awful, unreadable, low-contrast atrocity, when it is the most user-friendly, easiest-to-read, most seamlessly customizable thing I access on literally any given day. That being said, yes; awful low-contrast sites exist. But it's not, hah, black and white. There's certainly such a thing as too high of a contrast - depending on the person, monitor, and background…

HN's page styling is simple and stable enough that if someone comes here often and has any sort of visual or readibility complaints they can just fix their own issues by modifying the CSS in my opinion.

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#102
post #101

I'm always amused by HackerNews being presented as this awful, unreadable, low-contrast atrocity, when it is the most user-friendly, easiest-to-read, most seamlessly customizable thing I access on literally any given day. That being said, yes; awful low-contrast sites exist. But it's not, hah, black and white. There's certainly such a thing as too high of a contrast - depending on the person, monitor, and background…

HN's page styling is simple and stable enough that if someone comes here often and has any sort of visual or readibility complaints they can just fix their own issues by modifying the CSS in my opinion.

"The user can fix it themselves" is not an excuse for making something broken on purpose.

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would text posts be made unreadable? As for downvoted posts, eh, it would be better to collapse them by default or something instead of showing them but making them unreadable.

That's what happens with flagged posts. The point of graying posts is to leave a chance for redemption when snowflakes brigade those who post worthwhile comments that don't align with the groupthink. Enable flagged posts and you'll also find some that never deserved to be eliminated so vouch for them.

Flagged posts are completely removed now. They just say "[Flagged]."

E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35852495

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#104
post #66

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…

Well, the reason it shows "low contrast" on the page, is because the purpose of the page is to illustrate the low contrast problem. There are many sections that show the contrasting example of good contrast. What you're doing is running two virus scanners, and the second one finds the quarantine folder of the first one. You then claim the first antivirus is a virus. Nope. This was not a website designed for mobile -…

Well, I guess I should make mobile-web rebellion.

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what happens with flagged posts. The point of graying posts is to leave a chance for redemption when snowflakes brigade those who post worthwhile comments that don't align with the groupthink. Enable flagged posts and you'll also find some that never deserved to be eliminated so vouch for them.

Flagged posts are completely removed now. They just say "[Flagged]." E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35852495

You need to enable showdead in your profile.

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#106

I'm always amused by HackerNews being presented as this awful, unreadable, low-contrast atrocity, when it is the most user-friendly, easiest-to-read, most seamlessly customizable thing I access on literally any given day. That being said, yes; awful low-contrast sites exist. But it's not, hah, black and white. There's certainly such a thing as too high of a contrast - depending on the person, monitor, and background…

Try reading HN on an entry-level laptop with a crappy LCD display outdoors on a sunny day.

> outdoors on a sunny day

Outdoors on a sunny day is no time to read HackerNews! Get offline and enjoy your day.

Fear not downvoters, I speak as a fellow addict.

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#107
Semi-related: Several pharmacies sent brochures or similar material to my mom who doesn't see well anymore. All had extremely bad contrast and small writing using a narrow font with very thin stroke width. My mom couldn't read any of it. Do they not know their own target audience? Who is the main demographic of pharmacies!? WTF

On the computer she can use high contrast mode and zoom in. Not possible on printed medium.

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#108

I'm always amused by HackerNews being presented as this awful, unreadable, low-contrast atrocity, when it is the most user-friendly, easiest-to-read, most seamlessly customizable thing I access on literally any given day. That being said, yes; awful low-contrast sites exist. But it's not, hah, black and white. There's certainly such a thing as too high of a contrast - depending on the person, monitor, and background…

Try reading HN on an entry-level laptop with a crappy LCD display outdoors on a sunny day.

[deleted]

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#109

I'm always amused by HackerNews being presented as this awful, unreadable, low-contrast atrocity, when it is the most user-friendly, easiest-to-read, most seamlessly customizable thing I access on literally any given day. That being said, yes; awful low-contrast sites exist. But it's not, hah, black and white. There's certainly such a thing as too high of a contrast - depending on the person, monitor, and background…

Normal comment text on HN is fine, but the title and description text on a post page is absolutely awful low-contrast. It's medium gray on light gray. It's #828282 against #F6F6EF, a contrast ratio of 3.54:1 which is a fail. WCAG 2.0 level AA requires at least 4.5:1 for normal text. This isn't subjective or aesthetics, it's an objective measurement. It's genuinely uncomfortable to read when it's a long "Tell HN" or s…

> This isn't subjective or aesthetics, it's an objective measurement.

I’m going to push back against this slightly (I’m not disagreeing that the HN contrast is bad, but I am challenging the WCAG ratios). It’s objective, but it’s not a good measurement. WCAG computes contrast in sRGB, which is not perceptually uniform. As such there are cases where WCAG will give better scores to worse contrast. For example, the WCAG math prefers black text on a medium blue background to white text on a medium blue background, which is the exact inverse to what most people feel is most legible.

https://github.com/w3c/wcag/issues/695

It’s the biggest thing I wish would be changed in the WCAG.

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#110

I'm always amused by HackerNews being presented as this awful, unreadable, low-contrast atrocity, when it is the most user-friendly, easiest-to-read, most seamlessly customizable thing I access on literally any given day. That being said, yes; awful low-contrast sites exist. But it's not, hah, black and white. There's certainly such a thing as too high of a contrast - depending on the person, monitor, and background…

Normal comment text on HN is fine, but the title and description text on a post page is absolutely awful low-contrast. It's medium gray on light gray. It's #828282 against #F6F6EF, a contrast ratio of 3.54:1 which is a fail. WCAG 2.0 level AA requires at least 4.5:1 for normal text. This isn't subjective or aesthetics, it's an objective measurement. It's genuinely uncomfortable to read when it's a long "Tell HN" or s…

> This isn't subjective or aesthetics, it's an objective measurement.

Its an objective measurement, but whether the standard is correct or not is a subjective question of aesthetics. Or it could be empirical question if there qas a performance goal tied to it, and it was a testable proposition whether the objective measure corresponded to the performance goal optimally (sibling comment addressing perceptual uniformity suggests that for any given performance goal, that probably is not the case.)

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