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Change the colour of grey text back to black on website using poor contrast text

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31–40 of 117 posts

Re: Change the colour of grey text back to black on website using poor contrast text

#31
post #16

I recommend people with similar interests take a look at uBlock's filter language (yes, the ad blocker). It's a short and shallow learning curve until you can inject your personal CSS into webpages, and incrementally tweak them. Two small examples: "Show all text on the internet as black" *##*:style(color: black !important) "Show comment text on HN as bold" ycombinator.com##.comment:style(font-weight: bold !important…

How can I change everything that is notification bell red to grey.

That's going to be pretty specific CSS wise.

Maybe collect some common CSS framework techniques:

https://mui.com/material-ui/react-badge/#main-content

https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.0/components/badge/

etc. They are apparently often called "badges" or "indicators" and so on.

Or on sites you visit regularly you can just inspect the source and look for specificity.

Re: Change the colour of grey text back to black on website using poor contrast text

#32
post #3

I love the “nothing in nature is true black so don’t use #000000” argument. Correct, nothing is, and your #000000 won’t be either once it’s shown on a physical screen.

On one of my old phones (Samsung S4), the display would treat pure black differently to dark grey. Pure black would smear across the display when scrolling, a kind of ghosting effect. Probably some effect of the pixels being turned fully off. Dark greys didn't have this effect. I suspect a lot of these "dark grey text" conventions may be related to this hardware issue.

OLED pixels take slightly longer to turn back on from fully off. I remember some VR headsets had trouble with this and they just set the minimum brightness to "1" instead of "0".

Edit: note this is per-subpixel, so you need to set some value in each color channel.

Re: Change the colour of grey text back to black on website using poor contrast text

#34
post #23
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing about pure black isn't that it's unnatural, but that when paired with white its contrast can actually be uncomfortable and less accessible than a slightly toned down color combination (especially on full brightness). Can you find a citation for that statement? WCAG 2.1[0] mentions minimum contrast, but not maximum. The success criterion page itself is written in #000 on #fff. :) https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCA…

I don't have a citation, but a personal anecdote: When I was in charge for a website, an elderly woman contacted us and asked, if we could change the black text to a dark grey. She mentioned that the contest was too high, resulting for her in seeing ghost images of the letters. I changed the text color from black to something like #eee or #ddd (at least a change barely noticeable) and she later contacted us to to tha…

I think you mean #111 or #222. The ghost letter thing is interesting to me. Was the background plain white or more of a broken white?

Re: Change the colour of grey text back to black on website using poor contrast text

#35

Anybody has some extension to change colors when background is black and text is white? I don't know if this is common or not, but I just cannot look at that for more than a few seconds, my eyes burn. I never found an extension for Chrome that fixed this.

I'm using Reader mode on such sites, but some sites are structured in a way that only part of the text, if any, shows up in the Reader view.

I'm just hoping that sites with a fixed dark-mode design stay the minority because many of those that I've seen are horribly bad and literally hurt my eyes.

Re: Change the colour of grey text back to black on website using poor contrast text

#36
post #21

Can we also make an extension for simulating bad eyesight that everyone who makes websites with thin gray text would be forced to install?

Those already exist. You can simulate things like color blindness, tunnel vision, low contrast vision, and blurred vision, among other effects.

Yeah, I was talking about the forced part :)

Re: Change the colour of grey text back to black on website using poor contrast text

#37

I recommend people with similar interests take a look at uBlock's filter language (yes, the ad blocker). It's a short and shallow learning curve until you can inject your personal CSS into webpages, and incrementally tweak them. Two small examples: "Show all text on the internet as black" *##*:style(color: black !important) "Show comment text on HN as bold" ycombinator.com##.comment:style(font-weight: bold !important…

If contrast is the main issue, then you can use CSS filter functions. Put stuff like this on the body element:

filter: contrast(200%);

(200% is typically too strong.)

You can also go down in saturation like so:

filter: saturate(40%);

Or use both:

filter: saturate(40%) contrast(200%);

Re: Change the colour of grey text back to black on website using poor contrast text

#39
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta-irony at its finest.

What contrast do you want? A billion to one? At some point it's excessive, right? So there's some value less than infinite that you're after. Why is your monitor's maximum contrast the right value?

There's actually a book that studies this by measuring readability of print articles by seeing how far readers got: Type and Layout by Colin Wheildon.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1875750223/

The research upheld the "any color as long as its black" popular wisdom for text, but found that black text on a ~15% tinted background (any color) did not impede readability. (Deeper background tints impeded readability.)

> Why is your monitor's maximum contrast the right value?

Please give me maximum contrast and let me adjust my monitor.

Re: Change the colour of grey text back to black on website using poor contrast text

#40
post #19
post #3

I love the “nothing in nature is true black so don’t use #000000” argument. Correct, nothing is, and your #000000 won’t be either once it’s shown on a physical screen.

And nothing is true white so don't use #ffffff. We can continue with blue, green, red. /s

True magenta (#f0f) and true cyan (#0ff) are the worst if you ask me...
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