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

Never Use White Text on Black: Astygmatism and Conference Slides (2017)

jessicaotis.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 62 posts

Re: Never Use White Text on Black: Astygmatism and Conference Slides (2017)

#41

Post by ars »

bitwize wrote: post #25
ars wrote: post #20

White text on black is my second favorite. Only thing better is green text on black. The reason is very simple: There's less light coming from the screen into my eye. Every monitor I've ever owned I reduce the brightness to the lowest setting possible, and they are still too bright. Green is best because the high resolution parts of your eye only see green. So the blue and red components of white are just unnecessary…

Oh boy, are you going to love this state-of-the-art new display technology: https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4142/4765726924_0c81d46a5b_b.j... (Seriously, though, there may be an underlying physiological reason why the glow of a green phosphor CRT was so pleasing...)

I always set my IDE to emulate those green CRT's when I can.

But there is an underlying physiological reason, see: https://gamesx.com/misctech/visual.htm (the website is very old and has aged badly, but makes the point).

Your eye has no ability to see blue in high resolution.

Re: Never Use White Text on Black: Astygmatism and Conference Slides (2017)

#42

Post by [deleted] »

viraptor wrote: post #26
ars wrote: post #20

White text on black is my second favorite. Only thing better is green text on black. The reason is very simple: There's less light coming from the screen into my eye. Every monitor I've ever owned I reduce the brightness to the lowest setting possible, and they are still too bright. Green is best because the high resolution parts of your eye only see green. So the blue and red components of white are just unnecessary…

I'm curious about your experience with HDR / other real-black displays. I have the same "problem", but find the new TVs with high contrast / darker blacks much nicer to look at. New MBP seems good too. I haven't tried a HDR monitor at home though - maybe you have some experience?

[deleted]

Re: Never Use White Text on Black: Astygmatism and Conference Slides (2017)

#43

Post by michaelmrose »

colorincorrect wrote: post #35
michaelmrose wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This option sounds like it would be a poor reading for all. You can't please everyone but it seems like you can figure out how to displease most.

https://imgur.com/a/I1jFrG8 this doesn't seem that bad, but maybe my phrasing of the colors was inaccurate.

I pictured black text on darker blue background. That is readable enough.

Re: Never Use White Text on Black: Astygmatism and Conference Slides (2017)

#44

Post by nabilhat »

gnicholas wrote: post #15

I work in accessibility and see lots of posts like this one — cautioning the reader from every doing X because it creates accessibility problems for me. It may be possible to follow most/all such advice when building an app or website, but surely it is not possible for presentations (which have to be consumed in the same format by everyone present). Some may hate dark text on a light background; others may find that…

Like other commentors, I have astigmatism. Something not mentioned by other commentors; I have highly asymetrical astigmatism. Reading #FFF against #000 (dark on light or light on dark, either way) with both eyes open causes vividly strobing blue and red visual artifacts.

Stark black text on stark white background can do this, even though stark white background washes out the color artifacts to some extent. Fortunately, it's extremely unusual for anyone to lay out a page as #000 text on a #FFF background.

White text on a black background is a strobing hell. A dead black background is the perfect place to notice visual artifacts. Blazing white text sets visual artifacts effectively. Regardless, I use light-on-dark for much of my work. The problem I run into is that websites often end up being white-on-black, not light-on-dark. Light (not-white) text on a dark (not-black) background is pleasant, and my normal configuration for work.

Web design tutorials typically point out that #000 text on #FFF background is bad, and avoiding such extreme contrasts can be easier on the eyes. For whatever reason, that bit of know-how seems to vanish as soon as it's flipped to "dark mode".

Re: Never Use White Text on Black: Astygmatism and Conference Slides (2017)

#45

Post by gnicholas »

nabilhat wrote: post #44
gnicholas wrote: post #15

I work in accessibility and see lots of posts like this one — cautioning the reader from every doing X because it creates accessibility problems for me. It may be possible to follow most/all such advice when building an app or website, but surely it is not possible for presentations (which have to be consumed in the same format by everyone present). Some may hate dark text on a light background; others may find that…

Like other commentors, I have astigmatism. Something not mentioned by other commentors; I have highly asymetrical astigmatism. Reading #FFF against #000 (dark on light or light on dark, either way) with both eyes open causes vividly strobing blue and red visual artifacts. Stark black text on stark white background can do this, even though stark white background washes out the color artifacts to some extent. Fortunate…

Thanks for the detailed description! It's interesting to think about how one would meet these needs while simultaneously meeting the needs of people with scotopic sensitivity (prefer light text on dark background) and vision loss (require high contrast).

Honestly it seems like this three-way comparison is excellent evidence for the need for user-configurable reading options. It is unfortunate that on mobile, there are no browser plugins (except Firefox on Android, which is little-known, and action extensions on Safari, which is both little-known and does not support persistently-running plugins). As the world has gone mobile, we've ended up working/reading in app silos that cannot be made more accessible/configurable by plugins.

Re: Never Use White Text on Black: Astygmatism and Conference Slides (2017)

#46

Post by dang »

finnmagic wrote: post #17
aidenn0 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cylindrical correction in contact lenses tends to be both more expensive and not as good as glasses, so contact lens wearers with astigmatism may have this issue.

If the problem is that severe, get over your vanity and get a good pair of specs

Personal attacks will get you banned here. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting to HN.

Re: Never Use White Text on Black: Astygmatism and Conference Slides (2017)

#47

Post by arpa »

aidenn0 wrote: post #16
pcr0 wrote: post #8

I didn't think this was a problem as I assumed most people with astigmatism (myself included) wear corrective lenses or glasses.

Cylindrical correction in contact lenses tends to be both more expensive and not as good as glasses, so contact lens wearers with astigmatism may have this issue.

From my own experience, unless you are really, REALLY into sports, glasses are infinitely much more better in almost every aspect. Sure, if you are young, you might be afraid you look like a nerd, but trust this old fart, after 25 or so it does not matter at all; if anything, you are perceived as smarter.

Re: Never Use White Text on Black: Astygmatism and Conference Slides (2017)

#48

Post by arpa »

localhost wrote: post #18

Perhaps building an app that synchronizes conference slides to a phone and allows users to customize the contrast/appearance of the slides would help in this case?

Also as someone with myopia - so much better to read text from a smartphone than from the back of the auditorium!

Re: Never Use White Text on Black: Astygmatism and Conference Slides (2017)

#49

Post by arpa »

dwoozle wrote: post #2

What’s the alternative? Hopefully not black text on white slides. That’s terrible for me and others.

Could you go into more detail as to why? It actually is my preferred style of presentation. Hopefully you do not prefer yellow on blue, as it often gives me migraines, especially if there's lots of text.

Re: Never Use White Text on Black: Astygmatism and Conference Slides (2017)

#50

Post by localhost »

zwayhowder wrote: post #31
localhost wrote: post #18

Perhaps building an app that synchronizes conference slides to a phone and allows users to customize the contrast/appearance of the slides would help in this case?

I love that idea. It would let people requiring different contrasts etc see the content too. It won't help with pictures as easily, though a few apps these days do full PDF renders in different colours without much hassle. I am definitely in the no black background white text camp and on the web I have a javascript bookmarklet to zap the colour CSS and make everything rather plain looking. It's not all text for me, b…

Let me see if I can rally some folks on the Office team to build a PowerPoint companion app that does this. I think they have a hackathon coming up ...
Post reply on HN