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Contrast Rebellion

contrastrebellion.com

61–70 of 74 posts

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#61
post #56
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's perfectly reasonable to expect a user of the webpage to make it usable for themselves, whether that be by running it through google translate or turning on their OS's high contrast mode or whatever. No, it isn't. By deliberately choosing terrible contrast a designer is choosing to exclude people with visual impairment. That's why accessible websites is written into law and contrast is written into best practic…

Websites aren't published in braille either. As long ad the site content is compatible with standard assistive tech in the client software, it is fine.

This is hardly the same comparisone since it's not possible to publish them in braille on a monitor. And publishing a picture of the braille letters wouldn't even help since the blind person still couldn't read them.

Braille users are able to read text using a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refreshable_braille_display but that's not the same thing as a monitor.

Using grey text on grey backgrounds is much more similar to publishing all your text in images which makes is inaccessible to the blind person unless they install OCR software. But hey that's cool it's on them anyway right?

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#62
post #52

The following is a brain dump of an idea I have: I've thought of writing a proxy server that parses pages before serving them to you. It's goal would be to make webpages more readable, with sane font sizes and colors. I'm tired of reading webpages on my iPhone that are "optimized" for mobile where each line is 5 words. I could fit more text on the screen of my first laptop, which had half the resolution. Also, blog p…

How is that different from the already existing "Reader" mode in mobile Safari?

Or Instapaper et al.

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#63
post #36

Despite praising high contrast, this site hypocritically throws away contrast for no good reason. I can understand using non-white backgrounds, because it can reduce glare, but using grey text is pure fashion. This site uses color:#191919 text. As always, the only good solution is user CSS to set it to #000000. I use the Stylish addon for Firefox to let me toggle this quickly for sites with light or dark color scheme…

using non-white backgrounds, because it can reduce glare The real problem with glare is excessively shiny, glossy screens.

Yea, but they also help with better color rendition, finer details and deeper blacks.The "anti-glare" technology used on non glossy screens is basically reducing their optical capabilities...

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#64
post #51
post #23

I got a radical idea: do not touch the body text/background colors and let user agent/browser pick the colors according to users preferences.

This is the case now: browsers are scriptable and every major browser has the ability to install extensions to adjust nearly every single feature of a page's text rendering with just a few clicks. Turns out most people just don't care about typography.

"to install extensions". This is satire, right?

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#65
post #35
post #24

People should filter colors and fonts the same way they filter ads. Its easy.

A tiny number of people filter ads. Why should bad designers get to force a bunch of people to fix mistaken web design choices?

>A tiny number of people filter ads.

"41% of 18-29 year olds polled said they use adblock ... In some countries nearly one quarter of the online population has it installed"

-- http://blog.pagefair.com/2014/adblocking-report/

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#66
post #52

The following is a brain dump of an idea I have: I've thought of writing a proxy server that parses pages before serving them to you. It's goal would be to make webpages more readable, with sane font sizes and colors. I'm tired of reading webpages on my iPhone that are "optimized" for mobile where each line is 5 words. I could fit more text on the screen of my first laptop, which had half the resolution. Also, blog p…

Not a bad idea - but not there are services that do this by scraping the web page (Instapaper, Readability, etc), rather than requiring a proxy.

I encourage you to check them out - maybe you can do even better.

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#67
post #65
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A tiny number of people filter ads. Why should bad designers get to force a bunch of people to fix mistaken web design choices?

>A tiny number of people filter ads. "41% of 18-29 year olds polled said they use adblock ... In some countries nearly one quarter of the online population has it installed" -- http://blog.pagefair.com/2014/adblocking-report/

> There are about 144 million active adblock users around the world.

That is a small number of people of the total Internet population.

It's a bit surprising that you think an advertiser pushing ads is a suitable source for information about ad-blocking. Obviously they're going to say that ad-blocking is prevalant and that you need to run better ads to stop people running ad-blockers and oh, we just happen to be an ad company that runs that particular type of ad.

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#68
post #46
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A tiny number of people filter ads. Why should bad designers get to force a bunch of people to fix mistaken web design choices?

Why should people suffer because of bad designers?

Yes. That's what I said.

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#69
post #47
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you are a visitor and you feel that colors of the site you'd like to use discourage you to do so — you probably need to help yourself and make a custom CSS of your own This attitude is hostile to a wide range of people who already have to fight the computer to get things done and shouldn't have to fight the stupid decisions made by bad designers. > nobody fucking cares. For various values of "nobody" including "…

Asking visitors to make adjustments to their taste is far easier and less hostile than asking a webdev to create a webpage which uses colors that every person who visits it will like. In fact, it's not just hostile to the webdev, but impossible.

But I'm not asking designers to guess what visitors will like. I'm asking designers to avoid a narrow range of colours that we know people hate.

There is no reason to use light grey text on a mid grey background for text that you want people to read.

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#70
post #51
post #23

I got a radical idea: do not touch the body text/background colors and let user agent/browser pick the colors according to users preferences.

This is the case now: browsers are scriptable and every major browser has the ability to install extensions to adjust nearly every single feature of a page's text rendering with just a few clicks. Turns out most people just don't care about typography.

There are just two little config changes that obviously no-one would ever care about that make a lot of newer websites unusable: Setting a minimum font size and/or forcing your own default can cause text to pile up, grow to insane sizes, screw up column width that content becomes a tiny ribbon, or cause text to render entirely offscreen. One of the main causes is the same kind of control freak design that insists on low-contrast text - designers who want some kind of pixel-perfect "responsive Photoshop" that ensures no user anywhere can deviate from their choses appearance. The other is forced fonts including icon fonts - designers are not better at figuring out what fonts a user finds most readable (especially those with poor vision) and icon fonts require turning off the users fonts and often enabling javascript.
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