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Contrast Rebellion

contrastrebellion.com

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Re: Contrast Rebellion

#121

Post by TylerE »

542458 wrote: post #109
crazygringo wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Aren’t 99% of users going to be on some random sRGB display, though? How many of us have wide gamut displays that are actually properly calibrated? Looking at the examples from your link is illustrative… several of their 4.5:1 passes are basically unreadable. What I suspect needs to happen is an additional penalty if the background isn’t what would be considered a typical paper color (white, ivory, tan, etc. blues, purples and oranges are right out. )

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#122

Post by crazygringo »

542458 wrote: post #109
crazygringo wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks, TIL -- I had no idea. That's a super useful link.

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#123

Post by mcdonje »

kdazzle wrote: post #22
kentonv wrote: post #20

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 alw…

First time I read an argument against all black in design was this 2012 article. Something about it not being a color found in nature. Then, yeah, some people seemed to interpret it as “use gray on gray”. https://ianstormtaylor.com/design-tip-never-use-black/

The central idea there is to tweak the darks to align with the color palette, not to just make them gray.

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#124

Post by mcdonje »

>Clearly, aesthetics are important but aren't the ultimate goal of design. And often poor readability doesn't get noticed during the design process, as we are not like our users. We don't read the texts as a visitor does.

Ironic, since I had to flip my phone sideways in order to read that.

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#125

Post by [deleted] »

usernew wrote: post #66
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…

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 -…

[deleted]

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#127

Post by lmm »

Kwpolska wrote: post #49
NikolaNovak wrote: post #46

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…

The default font size on HN is unreadable, and has issues with contrast, especially with downvoted or text posts.

It's 9pt text, if that's unreadable the issue is with your user agent. I know a lot of browsers behave poorly on larger displays, but having each website guess how big a typical monitor is and use a treadmill of increasing font sizes is not an answer; you should demand better behaviour from your browser.

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#128

Post by lmm »

amelius wrote: post #41
gumby wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a theory that the reason those glyphs (in most languages, whether characters or ideograms) tend to have a similar, conservative aspect ratio is that they use a part of the early visual system that was useful in finding/tracking footprints (evidence of prey or threats) In the case of characters, especially hanzi/kanji, ones that are hard to recognize/distinguish either evolve (simplify and/or develop disambig…

If true then why are Latin and Arabic glyphs so different?

They're not?

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#129

Post by zinekeller »

TylerE wrote: post #121
542458 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Aren’t 99% of users going to be on some random sRGB display, though? How many of us have wide gamut displays that are actually properly calibrated? Looking at the examples from your link is illustrative… several of their 4.5:1 passes are basically unreadable. What I suspect needs to happen is an additional penalty if the background isn’t what would be considered a typical paper color (white, ivory, tan, etc. blues, p…

It's not that it's wrong to focus on sRGB but the computation itself does not use linear gamma (which is not excusable - incorrectly assuming that 2.2 gamma is how people perceive light results on overemphasis on brighter spots)

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#130

Post by makeitdouble »

lmm wrote: post #127
Kwpolska wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The default font size on HN is unreadable, and has issues with contrast, especially with downvoted or text posts.

It's 9pt text, if that's unreadable the issue is with your user agent. I know a lot of browsers behave poorly on larger displays, but having each website guess how big a typical monitor is and use a treadmill of increasing font sizes is not an answer; you should demand better behaviour from your browser.

Wasn't this the whole purpose of introducing em to replace points ?
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