Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Webdesigners: please make text readable

contrastrebellion.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–109 of 109 posts

Re: Webdesigners: please make text readable

#101

Post by 5l »

Ronkdar wrote: post #30
jsavimbi wrote: post #16

Do they print books with black pages and white text? No, they do not.

With good reason. If I read white on black for more than 5 minutes, whenever I look away there are negative lines floating across my vision.

I don't agree that it's good reasoning, and indeed most (or all?) early monitors used to be green/amber/white-on-black because it's easier on the eyes.

It's not a common problem I know but I have countless floaters swooshing around in my vision so for me staring at a mostly white screen all day is absolutely horrible and a great way to give myself eye strain.

Re: Webdesigners: please make text readable

#102

Post by 5l »

Groxx wrote: post #92
pilif wrote: post #22

Even worse (or probably related) than the general contrast problem is the absolutely crazy suggestion to use -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; in your CSS ( http://maxvoltar.com/archive/-webkit-font-smoothing ) I've yet to come across an instance where antialiased is better than using subpixel hinting. In addition, I think it's crazy that the browser would allow a site designer to alter such a highly OS- or even m…

> This is what we see by default. Some people like it, most don’t. (from maxvoltar, on the default webkit rendering (subpixel-antialiased)) Unsubstantiated claim is unsubstantiated. I, for one, find that I can read more quickly with OSX-style text rendering, and efficiency matters to me. As to the "high contrast movement" OP, I find the lower contrast easier on my eyes. And I have friends who have to wear sunglasses…

You sure they're wearing sunglasses for the high contrast and not because of the white background?

Re: Webdesigners: please make text readable

#103

Post by Groxx »

abstractbill wrote: post #93
Groxx wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is what we see by default. Some people like it, most don’t. (from maxvoltar, on the default webkit rendering (subpixel-antialiased)) Unsubstantiated claim is unsubstantiated. I, for one, find that I can read more quickly with OSX-style text rendering, and efficiency matters to me. As to the "high contrast movement" OP, I find the lower contrast easier on my eyes. And I have friends who have to wear sunglasses…

As to the "high contrast movement" OP, I find the lower contrast easier on my eyes. And I have friends who have to wear sunglasses to read books / computer screens because of the high contrast. It's a horse apiece. External monitors, at least, have contrast controls as well as brightness (I wonder why laptops don't).

The closest I've seen has been "Shades" for OSX - it just puts a colored transparent layer over everything (by default black) that makes the screen darker. Handy at night, when the lowest setting is still too bright, though it does make the not-blackness of on-screen black stand out.

Re: Webdesigners: please make text readable

#104

Post by tuhin »

duopixel wrote: post #12

There's a second problem that's popping up lately: font-face on the body text. System fonts have been painstakingly hinted to make them more readable on-screen. Most web-embeddable fonts don't have appropriate hinting or are just plain bad choices for body text. Hoefler & Frere Jones (one of the most respected foundries around) haven't released embeddable fonts because they've been working on it for years . The resul…

Some true facts that you might consider before passing that over-generalised statement:

-There are a number of fonts designed specifically for screen reading.

-Some of them happen to be preinstalled on our computers.

-Not all default fonts installed on our computers are meant for screen reading. Not all web safe fonts are either.

-A huge number of web fonts off late have been designed with screen in view. e.g FF Meta, FF Tisa Web Pro and so many others.

-There is nothing wrong with using font-face for body text.

Examples: Every article on trentwalton.com uses font-face (uses Typekit for webfonts) and works great in terms of readability. Please do not mix the poor aliasing on Windows with a problem with web fonts.

Re: Webdesigners: please make text readable

#105

Post by tuhin »

cpeterso wrote: post #88
duopixel wrote: post #12

There's a second problem that's popping up lately: font-face on the body text. System fonts have been painstakingly hinted to make them more readable on-screen. Most web-embeddable fonts don't have appropriate hinting or are just plain bad choices for body text. Hoefler & Frere Jones (one of the most respected foundries around) haven't released embeddable fonts because they've been working on it for years . The resul…

> There's a second problem that's popping up lately: font-face on the body text. Plus, browsers will flash the body text in the alternate system font (or a blank page) while the font-face file is downloaded from the web server.

http://24ways.org/2009/spruce-it-up

Also see related ways on how to tackle FOUT.

Re: Webdesigners: please make text readable

#106

Post by famfamfam »

cpeterso wrote: post #87
duopixel wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Helvetica on Windows is terrible, see https://github.com/paulirish/html5-boilerplate/issues/42 . This is because Helvetica comes from Linotype instead of Microsoft, and they care more about print than screens. Arial might not be a good typeface , but as a font it's pretty damn well hinted for screens. Except for Minion Web and Myriad, I haven't seen a really legible web font from Adobe that is usable at 11-15px. Heck…

Because Helvetica looks so bad on Windows, a good compromise for a CSS font stack is something like: font-family: "Helvetica Neue",Arial,sans-serif; Helvetica Neue (a minor reworking of Helvetica from 1983) is a Mac system font, but few Windows PCs have it. So Mac users get nice fonts and everyone else gets Arial. Many CSS font stacks list Helvetica after Arial, but that is silly because nearly all computers (like 98…

Mark Hurrell has blogged some of his testing on Helvetica font stacks (including Neue) at http://blog.mhurrell.co.uk/post/2946358183/updating-the-helv... which is worth a read. Current recommendation is to specify sans-serif but with additional specifications for Linux:

  font-family: Helmet, Freesans, sans-serif;

Re: Webdesigners: please make text readable

#108

Post by cpeterso »

tuhin wrote: post #105
cpeterso wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a second problem that's popping up lately: font-face on the body text. Plus, browsers will flash the body text in the alternate system font (or a blank page) while the font-face file is downloaded from the web server.

http://24ways.org/2009/spruce-it-up Also see related ways on how to tackle FOUT.

Thanks! Packing the font data into the CSS is a clever idea.

Re: Webdesigners: please make text readable

#109

Post by markahern »

bugsy wrote: post #61

That's all fine but doesn't go far enough, focusing only on contrast problems (related problems to contrast are using shadow engraving style on small fonts and clashing foreground/background color schemes). A really big problem on many sites is the length of lines. It is very difficult to read text that has too many words per line. A recent abysmal nightmare is Apple's decision to make Mail.app (and other apps) in 10…

Solution to mail.app problem: either make the middle column bigger, or don't use it in full screen.
Post reply on HN