51–60 of 74 posts
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.
Turns out most people just don't care about typography.
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 posts from medium.com currently crash mobile Safari.
Every website would require custom code. It's default failure mode would be to just show the original web page. I don't want to have to fuck with it when some page gets mangled and is completely unreadable.
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…
The real problem with glare is excessively shiny, glossy screens.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> do we really need to fix this at source? Yes. Otherwise you are chosing to exclude people.
Any choice you make will exclude some people. The colorblind won't be able to read it if you use some color combinations. Using such high-contrast fonts hurts my eyes and thus excludes me from enjoying it as much. It's likely people arenot "chosing to exclude", but rather happens to as a byproduct. It's far more likely someone chose low-contrast because they wished to help visitors eyes or for aesthetic purposes, not…
Your eyes and monitor may benefit from lowering the contrast/brightness. Most monitors seem to come set by default to maximum or near-maximum eye-watering brightness and contrast, which is great for in-store displays in an environment containing lots of other high-brightness lighting, but horrible for actual use. Turn it down so that black on white is comfortable to view.
It's far more likely someone chose low-contrast because they wished to help visitors eyes or for aesthetic purposes
It makes me wonder if those who use low-contrast designs are the same ones who have their monitors at such extreme settings that they have to compensate by reducing it on their pages, thus making it unreadable to those with their monitors set to comfortably reproduce black on white.
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Any choice you make will exclude some people. The colorblind won't be able to read it if you use some color combinations. Using such high-contrast fonts hurts my eyes and thus excludes me from enjoying it as much. It's likely people arenot "chosing to exclude", but rather happens to as a byproduct. It's far more likely someone chose low-contrast because they wished to help visitors eyes or for aesthetic purposes, not…
> 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…
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 "…
Hostile? I would call it "fair". Because, ok, let's assume you win. I'm wrong, you're right, and some ultimate dictator decides that all websites now are coming in black-on-white only. What should I do, as a person that feels low-contrast is much nicer than eye-burning one? Exactly, I'm about to make my own customizations or suffer. And then you should be saying, that black-on-white is hostile to me, which wouldn't m…
Your monitor brightness maybe set too high For example, mobile devices' minimum brightness is far too bright in a dark room.
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 "…
Hostile? I would call it "fair". Because, ok, let's assume you win. I'm wrong, you're right, and some ultimate dictator decides that all websites now are coming in black-on-white only. What should I do, as a person that feels low-contrast is much nicer than eye-burning one? Exactly, I'm about to make my own customizations or suffer. And then you should be saying, that black-on-white is hostile to me, which wouldn't m…
Your monitor brightness maybe set too high For example, mobile devices' minimum brightness is far too bright in a dark room.
Many of the examples looked borderline to me. How much contrast is 'enough'? Also - surely this is something that should be fixable in the OS or browser? OSX has an high-contrast accessibility mode. Do we really need to fix this at source?
Check out the fourth panel of the article. It doesn't take much to turn 'borderline' into 'awful'.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> do we really need to fix this at source? Yes. Otherwise you are chosing to exclude people.
Any choice you make will exclude some people. The colorblind won't be able to read it if you use some color combinations. Using such high-contrast fonts hurts my eyes and thus excludes me from enjoying it as much. It's likely people arenot "chosing to exclude", but rather happens to as a byproduct. It's far more likely someone chose low-contrast because they wished to help visitors eyes or for aesthetic purposes, not…
So you oppose consciousness-raising of an issue, to make people aware of it? You oppose "Hey designers, here are some issues to think of"?
It's perfectly reasonable to expect a user of the webpage to make it usable for themselves
The solutions you offer are sledgehammers. Better to just be a good designer who is inclusive, than demand users monochrome their entire operating system just to read your site. I mean, that's even worse than "This page is best viewed in Browser X".