[HN Gopher] Contrast Rebellion
___________________________________________________________________
Contrast Rebellion
Author : gjvc
Score : 219 points
Date : 2023-05-07 10:40 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (contrastrebellion.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (contrastrebellion.com)
| FiddlerClamp wrote:
| For the past 20 years, I've been using the 'zap' and 'zap images'
| bookmarklets from this web site:
|
| https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html
|
| They don't work on every site, but they're a good start. 'Reader
| mode' bookmarklets like https://github.com/lordastley/readable
| can often be configured for simple white on black text too.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Dark reader[0] has been a godsend when it comes to readability.
| Sure the content isn't how the creator intended it but most of
| the pages don't have a dark mode option so Dark Reader's
| rendering suits my eyes and I find that to a certain extent, it
| also improves readability, especially for those low-contrast
| texts.
|
| [0]: https://darkreader.org/
| detrites wrote:
| > Scroll-behaviour hijack and unreadable text on mobile?
| [deleted]
| Jabbles wrote:
| I think adding (2011) to the title would help explain many of the
| shortcomings of this webpage.
| nahuel0x wrote:
| Not only text... take Whatsapp, used by all people with a
| cellphone in the world, whose sent and read check marks are
| distinguished only by a subtle change of color instead of having
| different icons.
| 7sidedmarble wrote:
| All people outside of the States
| wildrhythms wrote:
| I work with graphic/UI designers and I have to be the one to
| advocate for using more than color to differentiate states, and
| to meet acceptable contrast ratios. And don't get me started on
| hiding things behind hard to discover hover states. The
| managers who are supposed to oversee the development of these
| products don't give a shit about accessibility. Sad state of
| affairs.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > The managers who are supposed to oversee the development
|
| Yeah, I can understand kids wanting to play with whatever's
| new in HTML5 etc. But I don't get why the manager in charge
| of the project doesn't say "Yes, very cool; but it's
| unreadable if there's sun-glare. Fix it, please."
|
| Well, I do sort of get it; the manager's a kid too, and he
| likes custom controls and "distinctive" typography as much as
| the developer, and doesn't know anything about accessbility.
| I'm not talking about _real_ accessibility; I just mean
| ordinary people being able to access the content.
|
| Yeah, you can say "fuck it, I'll go somewhere else". But a
| lot of sites that I rely on have unique content.
| mthoms wrote:
| Just a heads up to everyone complaining about the (valid) issues
| on mobile and elsewhere with this site. It doesn't appear to have
| been updated in 12 years. In 2011, the newest iPhone was the 4s.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20111006171723/https://contrastr...
|
| Just adding some context.
| amelius wrote:
| With all the AI we have these days, why can't browsers have auto-
| contrast?
| syngrog66 wrote:
| best practices:
|
| 1. user resizable text fonts
|
| 2. user zoomable regions
|
| 3. on screen: white on black, default. users can tweak
|
| 4. on paper: black on white, default.
|
| 5. (related to 3 and 4) when looking at a PDF on screen let user
| see it as white on black, if wishes
|
| these are all in my own personal rulebook of software engineering
| best practices anyway
|
| "Kids, get off my lawn."
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Ok, this is much better than pointless fashion font BS.
|
| Notice how the washed out look mirrors interior wall grey-on-
| white that dominates everywhere.
|
| It is funny that the #1 enlightening story of 2023 so far for me
| is the study that "color is disappearing from the world".
|
| I can kind of see it in this site. Color is an opinion.
| White/grey is a lack of opinion. Black fonts are YELLING AT
| PEOPLE. Grey-on-grey is surreptitious quiet propaganda.
|
| There it is: the draining of color from the world is about making
| compliant people more compliant. Forget color studies to make
| people happier. We've moved past such things, and the new
| dominant color scheme is designed to avoid making people thing
| and keep them compliant and susceptible to the flood of
| propaganda in the world.
|
| I am now amazed that this semi-pointless site has awoken a new
| conspiracy theory in my aging brain. Kudos!
| FpUser wrote:
| I am all for removing this light grey text on white background
| abomination.
|
| Also I understand that "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,".
| In my personal opinion barely visibly text is not "beautiful" but
| rather ugly.
| detourdog wrote:
| I'm dumb struck that any design focused company can ship white
| text on a grey background.
| XorNot wrote:
| I was hoping for a browser extension which would automatically
| replace "shade of grey" text with black.
| layer8 wrote:
| For Firefox at least there is the Font Contrast extension:
| https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/font-contrast-fix/
| xigoi wrote:
| Try out Dark Reader.
| mkidd wrote:
| This is a huge pet peeve for me. Shouldn't this be a "solved"
| style problem in 2023! I'd gladly fire every tenth web designer
| responsible for this problem regardless of their other merits.
|
| Small fonts are one thing. There are browser hot keys to change
| the font size. And I'm a huge fan of the "Zoom Text Only" option
| in Firefox where the rest of page doesn't go flying off the edge
| of my viewing area. But low contrast text is hugely annoying.
| What are my options? Open the developer tools and tweak the CSS
| every time? Try to find a good browser extension that solves the
| problem? Write my own? And some of these solutions are
| inconvenient or impossible on mobile.
|
| I understand using low contrast text (and small fonts) for
| tedious but necessary legal disclaimers. But if you use it
| elsewhere, I'll move on--either you have nothing to say and don't
| really want people to read the text, have a poor designer, or are
| generally incompetent.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > Shouldn't this be a "solved" style problem in 2023!
|
| Grey-on-grey text is idiotic. It's everywhere. So is scroll-
| jacking; so is weird animations on text articles (The Guardian
| does this from time to time). So is web-pages that come up as a
| sheet of whiteness, if you don't want to run javascript
| indiscriminately (REACT, I think). So is megabytes of script,
| just to display a page of text.
|
| This kind of stuff is weenie web-developers, showing off. I
| used to do that - in 2001. It's fun. But I wasn't designing
| high-profile websites with important text content.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| >What are my options?
|
| Set your browser to open every website in reader mode by
| default. It takes one week to get used to and then you will
| never want to go back. You can without hassle add exceptions
| for those websites that are not good in reader mode. This
| solution works great on desktop and mobile.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Angry old man take: people that do HTML are young people that
| don't mind doing fairly complex technical work for peanuts,
| because they can get visual satisfaction more quickly.
|
| "Design" is something that is after a one or two trick pony. It
| is intended to disrupt known patterns (often loaded with
| decades of collected wisdom, sometimes legitimately backward).
|
| Since the UI footsoldiers are all underpaid interns being
| churned on a yearly basis, collected wisdom won't be
| transferred unless it was provided in education.
|
| It's not just HTML. There's a reason the same IT mistakes occur
| over and over and over. IT ages out all the people that achieve
| "wisdom". They either move above the point where "progress and
| wise refinement" would occur into the world of enterprise visio
| diagram engineering, or out of the industry period.
|
| Now get off my lawn.
| ComodoHacker wrote:
| Dark Reader extension tries to solve this problem. It's primary
| use case is adding dark mode support, but it can help with
| contrast too.
| einpoklum wrote:
| Sometimes a literal rebellion against company or project
| officers, with a formal mandate to axe an application or
| website's nicely legible interface - by "modernizing" it or
| making it more attractive/fashionable/whatever.
| kps wrote:
| This site flips between dark-on-light and light-on-dark, at least
| one of which is a visual encumbrance to some people -- see
| 'astigmatic halation' -- and the other of which may well be to
| others. (In my experience, switching between the two, as too many
| sites do for code display, is the worst.)
|
| If you're not using browser default colors, respect `@prefers-
| color-scheme`.
| Y_Y wrote:
| They use the "desaturated" hn text as an infringing example.
| Shots fired!
|
| I'm totally on board with their thesis and was about to come here
| and sing their praises, but then I found that they've annoyingly
| conflated page links and anchor links so the back button didn't
| do what I expected it to.
|
| In any case playing whack-a-mole with modern web design flaws
| seems worthwhile to me so I'm in favour.
| enlyth wrote:
| Yeah the desaturated text on HN is confusing. It is for
| example, applied to flagged posts, so I first associated the
| lower contrast with being flagged, but then I noticed it is
| also applied to self posts like Ask HN or Show HN, and I kept
| wondering why are all these people getting flagged? Turns out
| it is just the way it is.
|
| Not to mention it's also hard to read. While this website works
| well and has a great community, it is kind of the embodiment of
| this meme:
| https://twitter.com/TheProgrammerMe/status/16528824903596810...
| beardyw wrote:
| So my comments are not down voted, just desaturated!
| jonplackett wrote:
| I agree with the contrast rebellion
|
| But it's a bit ironic that this website is impossible to read on
| mobile because the font is TINY - my other massive pet peeve as a
| person without particularly good vision.
| ilyt wrote:
| _Stares at HN_
|
| can we please fucking stop with the light gray text bullshit here
| ?
| aetherspawn wrote:
| I recently tried to switch Windows 11 to high contrast mode at
| work to back-date the flat design and make it easier to use, but
| it broke around 50% of the apps including Gmail on Chrome (got
| solid black letterboxes).
|
| A few things worked out of the box like Office 365.
|
| Anyway, high contrast mode looks OK on Windows 11 but the apps
| integration is a sad state of affairs right now.
| [deleted]
| callesgg wrote:
| To hell with webpages that alter scrolling behavior.
|
| But to be fair this page was better than most pages that dare to
| do it, it was almost not buggy on this page.
| Culonavirus wrote:
| Buy an OLED monitor/tv and an OLED smartphone. The issue is still
| there, but to a much lower degree. Also, black is black (off).
| "Once you go black, you can't go back."
| nathias wrote:
| why are people so obsessed with enforcing accesibility on every
| website, when its obvious that anyone who has a disability and
| prefers for example more contrast can implement system wide
| solutions.
| throwanem wrote:
| They're no longer hijacking scroll - progress! Now if they could
| just figure out how responsive design actually works, and make
| this readable on any screen size smaller than the ones it was
| built on...
| avodonosov wrote:
| This site was a response to a very annoying practice in fashion
| during these years - people were writing full articles and
| websites in light grey font color.
|
| My complains back then:
| http://avodonosov.blogspot.com/2014/12/web-design-advice.htm...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8776744
|
| Today I don't see this practiced. Strange to see the
| contrastrebellion on top of HN.
| ZoomZoomZoom wrote:
| For paper you'd like the maximum contrast, but screens emit
| light, and maximum contrast puts additional strain on the eyes.
| There's a big but, though. This is for people with normal
| eyesight. As far as I understand, some people require this
| hurtful (to me) level of contrast just to be able to read.
| Additionally, you can significantly lower contrast just adjusting
| your monitor's brightness, but there's a limit on how far can you
| go in the opposite direction and it doesn't help if there's not
| enough contrast to begin with.
|
| If you can't solve it with CSS presets, I think it's better to
| stick with higher contrast for these reasons. For my blog I just
| use black-on-white, even though for me personally it's too much
| if it's more than just a couple of paragraphs. I tend to lower my
| display brightness while checking my own blog. :)
|
| Another nuance I don't see discussed is at least not keeping the
| empty background around the content div at the maximum value
| level. It's just emitting pure light around the main content for
| no use.
| NathanielK wrote:
| > but screens emit light, and maximum contrast puts additional
| strain on the eyes.
|
| That's just a problem with manufacturers putting displays with
| high dynamic range into devices and not putting decent HDR
| software implementations in.
|
| Some apple devices are smart about it though. When you open up
| an HDR video, it cranks the backlight to make those highlights
| pop, but dims the LCD by lowering the contrast in software.
| This means high contrast websites don't sear your retinas while
| your media can still take better advantage of your display.
|
| https://prolost.com/blog/edr
| chrismorgan wrote:
| > _but screens emit light, and maximum contrast puts additional
| strain on the eyes_
|
| Depends on the screen. You don't know if the viewer is using
| e-ink or something like that (or even printing to paper--though
| in _that_ case especially, colours specified in your stylesheet
| are more likely to be just ignored). If they're using an LCD or
| similar, you also have no idea about their brightness settings.
| They might be ridiculously overbright, as is stupidly common,
| or "maximum contrast" may actually be delightfully pleasant
| because they've got sensibly-set brightness. Certainly for me
| in my current lighting circumstances, simple black on white
| will look delightful, matching the ambient lighting neatly.
| ZoomZoomZoom wrote:
| Well it's just a problem of finding the baseline.
|
| I tend to think the "sensible" setting for the hardware is to
| afford the maximum dynamic range. This way no loss occurs if
| the material requires it, but if not, it needs to be limited
| it in software. This, of course, would lead to "ridiculously
| overbright" text, and limited contrast solves this problem
| more or less completely (this is why I override the
| background colour for my PDF viewer). My opinion is
| influenced by working with graphics, though.
|
| I also believe the most common display technology used for
| desktops should be this baseline, and currently it's LCD.
|
| However, this creates problems for people with different
| hardware and different eyesight and light sensitivity.
| Perhaps it's the OS that should provide some tooling to
| display the colours differently for different displays and
| different modes (image/text/other). The changes must be
| informed by the software, so for example, you could mark you
| site's colourscheme as "for reading" and the dynamic range
| would adapt properly.
|
| The way the OS adapts that I saw is atrocious, perhaps
| because optimized for a different metric. My laptop changing
| the display brightness and contrast when I use Windows on
| battery looks bad regardless of what's on display.
| hartator wrote:
| Join the don't-hijack-my-scrolling rebellion.
| newhotelowner wrote:
| And thin font for the paragram. Why? It may look nice on mac but
| everywhere else it's not readable.
| gnicholas wrote:
| > _sometimes we only think about aesthetics. Clearly, aesthetics
| are important but aren 't the ultimate goal of design._
|
| Exactly -- we get caught up in form over function. The goal of
| text is to be readable, not to look pretty.
|
| Text display formats like BeeLine are aesthetically
| nontraditional (to put it kindly), but from a readability
| perspective they are a godsend for many readers. [1] BeeLine is
| typically offered as a user-configurable option, and most sites
| with BeeLine have it off by default. But some sites have found it
| to be so helpful at increasing engagement that they actually turn
| it on by default. As one user put it: "it's ugly, but it works!".
|
| 1: http://www.beelinereader.com [disclosure: I am the founder]
| doodlesdev wrote:
| It would be nice since they are advocating for readable text if
| the font sizes were appropriate on mobile. Even funnier is that
| lighthouse shows a multitude of accessibility problems in the
| page including.... low contrast.
|
| https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/https-contrastrebellion-c...
|
| Apparently the reason for the awful sizing on mobile is missing
| the responsive viewport meta tag... IDK, I agree with the content
| of the website but it's just mind-numbing that it has these
| issues.
| usernew wrote:
| Well, the reason it shows "low contrast" on the page, is
| because the purpose of the page is to illustrate the low
| contrast problem. There are many sections that show the
| contrasting example of good contrast. What you're doing is
| running two virus scanners, and the second one finds the
| quarantine folder of the first one. You then claim the first
| antivirus is a virus. Nope.
|
| This was not a website designed for mobile - that's why it
| doesn't look appropriate on mobile. Not every website is
| designed for mobile - in fact there are usually two completely
| different websites for mobile and desktop. This one is only for
| desktop. This complaint is like renting a sports car and
| complaining it's not doing a good job at transporting your
| piano.
|
| There is one actually valid issue with the website though,
| which you do not bring up. It singles out websites for some
| reason, when the issue has zero to do with websites. Windows
| itself - all over the place - has ridiculous light gray on
| white, or light gray on dark gray (in dark theme). It's
| literally not readable half the time. Android has the same -
| now with more empty space, and page scrolling through 2 lines
| of tiny text and a toggle that changes description on toggle,
| so you don't know what it's doing. Heck, the service tag
| printed on the bottom of my silver dell laptop, is gray.
|
| then we have things like expensive custom license plates with
| nature pictures and a tiny font. that all the drug dealers buy.
| and lastly - faces. the only way to tell a nose from a cheek
| from afar, is light-tan vs dark-tan (in the shadow). And with
| some people, the only way you can find them at night at all, is
| if they smile at your joke.
| meatjuice wrote:
| Well, I guess I should make mobile-web rebellion.
| blep-arsh wrote:
| To quote the website, "designers need to think of <...>
| reading on tiny screens"
| MrJohz wrote:
| I do a lot of web development, and a lot of that is stuff
| designed for desktops. I do my best to make sure it works as
| well as can be expected on mobile devices as well, but I
| completely agree that it does make things more complicated,
| and that often you do need a different design, or at least a
| very flexible design.
|
| But this is not a complicated web application, this is a web
| document. If they had just added the right meta tags, it
| would have probably been enough. I'd be surprised if you
| really even need media queries for a page like this, just
| judicious use of `rem` and `%`. It's also very easy to test -
| just make your browser window thinner. Or open devtools on
| the side, and drag it around a bit. Or there's even a button
| in most browsers' devtools where it'll show the page in
| different common mobile and desktop sizes. I think lighthouse
| usually defaults to mobile too. (Not that lighthouse is
| necessarily all that valuable of a metric, but it's there,
| it's a couple of clicks away.)
|
| The point the website is making is that accessibility is
| important. Light text on a light background might be
| aesthetically pleasing, but it's difficult to read for many
| people, and as developers and designers, we have a duty to
| make our work accessible. I fully agree. But mobile users -
| and especially mobile-only users - are also an important
| demographic, and deserve accessibility considerations as
| well.
|
| Especially when those accessibility considerations would take
| at most half an hour of work.
| zsz wrote:
| It's not a matter of "deserve" and "right to." What use is
| having a site, that places an artificial hurdle for no
| acceptable reason? What use is having visitors rage-close
| the tab they opened for one's website, in contempt and
| disgust?
|
| Websites, for the most part, aren't composed and
| administered by government agencies, to provide beneficial
| information or services paid for by taxes (and it is
| instructive that federal agencies have been section 508 (of
| the Rehabilitation Act) compliant for decades, precisely
| because they are taxpayer funded and therefore have an
| obligation to make information and services accessible).
|
| So why shoot themselves in the foot, from the get-go? It's
| not my right that you make your site readable to me. But if
| you want me to be a repeat visitor, then why make it a
| difficult and frustrating experience for me? Any person who
| produces such a site has misplaced priorities.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| You believe some of these sections are _meant_ to be bad
| contrast, while others are meant to demo good contrast?
|
| Which are which?
|
| I can't understand exactly which sections the lighthouse
| report is flagging. I also thought I wasn't sure some of
| those sections were sufficient contrast, but all the ones I
| tested actually did pass WCAG contrast test.
|
| If the web page has chosen to make some sections
| intentionally bad contrast but others good contrast, without
| telling you which are which... that is not the educational
| strategy I would have picked. But I'm not convinced it's
| doing that.
|
| But you are?
| mthoms wrote:
| It was written in 2011. Was that tag in regular use at that
| time? I have no idea.
| doodlesdev wrote:
| For reference the iPhone 4 had already been released, so
| mobile design was already a thing. The viewport meta tag
| wasn't a thing though, or at least not widespread as HTML5
| release spec was finalized by W3C in 2014.
|
| I did not see that the website was this old when I first saw
| it. Still, I've used websites from the 90s that worked better
| on mobile lol (I also used websites in 2023 that were awful,
| to be fair).
| ryanschneider wrote:
| It also doesn't support reader mode, and the tan text is very
| hard for me to read.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| Agreed, this site was a rather unpleasant experience to read
| and contrast was certainly among the issues for me as well.
|
| How ironic.
| masswerk wrote:
| If you follow the site of the day (SOTD) link, it says, "Site
| of the Day - Aug 3, 2011". (Nearly 12 years ago.)
| luketheobscure wrote:
| I'm not sure why those sections were flagged for low contrast.
| Manually checking the contrast for those colors at
| https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ shows that they
| are all WCAG AAA compliant.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I'm always amused by HackerNews being presented as this awful,
| unreadable, low-contrast atrocity, when it is the most user-
| friendly, easiest-to-read, most seamlessly customizable thing I
| access on literally any given day.
|
| That being said, yes; awful low-contrast sites exist. But it's
| not, hah, black and white. There's certainly such a thing as too
| high of a contrast - depending on the person, monitor, and
| background light.
| vasco wrote:
| HN's page styling is simple and stable enough that if someone
| comes here often and has any sort of visual or readibility
| complaints they can just fix their own issues by modifying the
| CSS in my opinion.
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| "The user can fix it themselves" is not an excuse for making
| something broken on purpose.
| zagrebian wrote:
| Try reading HN on an entry-level laptop with a crappy LCD
| display outdoors on a sunny day.
| [deleted]
| rodgerd wrote:
| And that's before considering the fixed width.
| Swizec wrote:
| > outdoors on a sunny day
|
| Outdoors on a sunny day is no time to read HackerNews! Get
| offline and enjoy your day.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Hackernews has tiny up and down arrows and minimal contrast on
| downvoted comments. A pain to use on mobile.
| cratermoon wrote:
| The fonts on HN are a bit small. I have my browser set for HN
| to get a 125% magnification.
|
| The comment text is a nice #000000, but the rest of the text is
| #828282, which is insufficiently contrasty. Lighthouse flags
| this, as well as some other accessibility issues.
|
| I notice that on mobile the front page will sometimes have tiny
| text and if I reload then it will be larger. I'm not sure why
| the non-deterministic behavior there.
|
| The line length of about 144 is uncomfortably long. It should
| be about half that. Line height of 1.5 would improve
| readability as well.
| FpUser wrote:
| I do not think people in general need maximum contrast. What
| they need is near optimal contrast and there are objective
| recommendations on how to achieved it.
|
| What we often have instead is barely readable light gray text
| in the name of "clean" design. Well it is not clean, it is
| moronic. If creators disrespects potential readers that much
| they might as well present blank screen and be done with it.
| ilyt wrote:
| That's more statement due to how terrible other sites are; for
| example's HN utterly fucking idiotic idea of making any "Show
| HN" posts text body light gray
| crazygringo wrote:
| Normal comment text on HN is fine, but the title and
| description text on a post page _is_ absolutely awful low-
| contrast.
|
| It's medium gray on light gray. It's #828282 against #F6F6EF, a
| contrast ratio of 3.54:1 which is a fail. WCAG 2.0 level AA
| requires at least 4.5:1 for normal text. This isn't subjective
| or aesthetics, it's an objective measurement.
|
| It's genuinely uncomfortable to read when it's a long "Tell HN"
| or similar.
|
| > _There 's certainly such a thing as too high of a contrast_
|
| Not really, as long as you can adjust your screen brightness.
| That's what screen brightness is _for_. You can always decrease
| contrast that 's too high, but you can't increase it much if it
| starts too low.
| 542458 wrote:
| > This isn't subjective or aesthetics, it's an objective
| measurement.
|
| I'm going to push back against this _slightly_ (I'm not
| disagreeing that the HN contrast is bad, but I am challenging
| the WCAG ratios). It's objective, but it's not a good
| measurement. WCAG computes contrast in sRGB, which is not
| perceptually uniform. As such there are cases where WCAG will
| give better scores to worse contrast. For example, the WCAG
| math prefers black text on a medium blue background to white
| text on a medium blue background, which is the exact inverse
| to what most people feel is most legible.
|
| https://github.com/w3c/wcag/issues/695
|
| It's the biggest thing I wish would be changed in the WCAG.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > This isn't subjective or aesthetics, it's an objective
| measurement.
|
| Its an objective measurement, but whether the standard is
| correct or not is a subjective question of aesthetics. Or it
| could be empirical question if there qas a performance goal
| tied to it, and it was a testable proposition whether the
| objective measure corresponded to the performance goal
| optimally (sibling comment addressing perceptual uniformity
| suggests that for any given performance goal, that probably
| is not the case.)
| JJMcJ wrote:
| HN has the better choice. If you don't want stark look of black
| on white, change the background color, not the font color.
|
| Not quite sure what the point of some comments being in lower
| contrast.
| least wrote:
| The comments in lower contrast are ones that have been
| downvoted. The more it is downvoted the less and less visible
| it becomes. It's clever but it makes the site less
| accessible.
|
| But other elements, including submission text like in an Ask
| HN thread are also too low contrast.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| The default font size on HN is unreadable, and has issues with
| contrast, especially with downvoted or text posts.
| fafzv wrote:
| [dead]
| ben_w wrote:
| > especially with downvoted or text posts.
|
| I think making them unreadable is the point?
| rcme wrote:
| I agree for downvoted posts, but why do text submissions
| need to be unreadable?
| detaro wrote:
| I think it originally was meant to discourage those too
| (they also get a ranking penalty afaik), since HN should
| primarily be a link site.
|
| It's a bit off though, since it e.g. also applies to the
| "officially selected" Launch HN: posts.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Why would text posts be made unreadable?
|
| As for downvoted posts, eh, it would be better to collapse
| them by default or something instead of showing them but
| making them unreadable.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| That's what happens with flagged posts. The point of
| graying posts is to leave a chance for redemption when
| snowflakes brigade those who post worthwhile comments
| that don't align with the groupthink. Enable flagged
| posts and you'll also find some that never deserved to be
| eliminated so vouch for them.
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| Flagged posts are completely removed now. They just say
| "[Flagged]."
|
| _E.g._ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35852495
| Kwpolska wrote:
| You need to enable showdead in your profile.
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| Ahhh. Thanks! Being able to "vouch" for a post that's
| been flagged is a cool feature.
| arp242 wrote:
| > The default font size on HN is unreadable
|
| Arguably the best feature of the web is that any content can
| be zoomed in and out as much as one pleases without problems.
| It does break on some websites, but as someone who zooms in
| most content I find it's relatively rare.
|
| If you make text large you will have people complaining the
| text is too large. If you make text small you will have
| people complaining the text is too small. You you make text
| somewhere in-between you will have people complaining from
| both ends. So as long as you ensure it can be zoomed it
| doesn't really matter.
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| The size and spacing of the links and buttons could be bigger
| on mobile though.
| fsh wrote:
| One of the worst offenders is Obsidian. Users on hn keep praising
| the UI, but by default the menu text is borderline unreadable
| under less than ideal lighting conditions.
| mech422 wrote:
| I don't complain too much about VS Code and Obsidian as there
| are so many themes that are just a click away... I even have
| matching themes for them, which is nice since I use them
| together a lot.
|
| But in general, I have issues with site font sizes and contrast
| as well. I'm extremely near sighted, and getting older - I have
| no idea how people can actually read long form content on cell
| phones with the tiny screens...
| zsz wrote:
| It's a bit ironic, that most of the text on that site is too
| small to read on a smartphone, for my aging eyes.
| kentonv wrote:
| Weirdly, this site uses `color: #1b1b1b` instead of black.
|
| Why? The difference is barely noticeable, but black provides more
| contrast and IMO looks better than #1b1b1b.
|
| I've seen many designers assert that being slightly off-black is
| "better" for some reason, but isn't this the same argument that
| eventually leads to low-contrast designs? Why is a little bit of
| contrast reduction good, but a lot is bad? Pure black always
| looks (slightly) better to me (I commonly open the inspector and
| toggle the color to test this). And anyway, the variation in
| people's monitor settings is probably much wider than the
| difference between #1b1b1b and black, so what is even the point?
| Why waste brainpower trying to decide exactly how much contrast
| reduction is good, and risk going too far for some people while
| creating an imperceptible difference for others?
|
| (To be clear, if it's not obvious, I'm a big fan of this site's
| message... but apparently I'd go even further.)
| epiccoleman wrote:
| It's funny, because I've never really _thought_ hard about
| this, but I made a similar decision on my personal site.
|
| My site has a "dark mode" style theme - dark background and
| "white" text.
|
| When I was initially designing the theme, I opted for a
| slightly-less-white text color, and as I've spent more time on
| it, I ended up bumping that color to be closer to pure white.
| (I'm using Tailwind, so this change amounted to "text-
| neutral-400" -> "text-neutral-300".)
|
| I think I did this because the "more white" color seemed...
| sharper (very insightful, I know)? Like it was "an assault on
| the eye" to have the color be so bright. As I continued working
| on the site, I decided, in short, that that was stupid, and
| that I should have more contrast.
|
| This was a good reminder for me that some of my pages need that
| styling updated, but it works out well for demonstrating the
| difference:
|
| This page has the old, less contrasting color for the body text
| (text-neutral-400):
| https://epiccoleman.com/posts/2023-03-07-how-i-built-this-si...
|
| This page has the new, "whiter" color (text-neutral-300):
| https://epiccoleman.com/posts/2023-04-05-svg-circle-of-fifth...
|
| After skimming through these again as I linked them in this
| post, I think I could even bump it up to be even closer to
| white.
|
| I also have a pretty bright monitor (it's an Apple Thunderbolt
| Display that I got for a pittance from my old office when they
| switched to Dell monitors). So that may be influencing me
| towards slightly less contrast.
|
| Anyway, not to ramble, but I guess my point is - design is
| hard! It's not easy to take into account all the myriad
| different factors that need to be considered to make designs
| that look aesthetically pleasing while maintaining readability
| at various brightnesses and screen sizes and so on and so
| forth.
|
| Edit: One other consideration - I wanted some color contrast
| between elements like text, headings, and the post date - so
| that's another thing I was trying to take into account. For
| example, if you want your headings to be a bit brighter than
| your text, you're left using (for example) text-neutral-200 for
| headings and text-neutral-300 for text. Again, as I continued
| tweaking, I realized that the size difference between headings
| and text does enough work establishing contrast that this was
| unnecessary - but it's just one more factor in a long list of
| things a designer has to think about to make things look right.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I'm not a designer, but personally I like to reserve the
| extreme colors for the rare occasions you need something
| "blacker than black" or the equivalent with your color.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| It's a holdover from color printing processes. Rich Black (100%
| K over another color) and Registration Black (full everything)
| can look bad or even damage the paper.
|
| It's like design's equivalent of not ending sentences with
| prepositions.
| ilyt wrote:
| The difference is probably more noticeable on OLED screens that
| have "true" black.
|
| For personal themes I do use a bit of off black, althought
| usually it's something like very dark gray. It just makes
| screen not a complete black hole late at night
| layer8 wrote:
| The irony is that "pure black" (#000) is already off-black on
| non-OLED displays. IPS displays in particular are relatively
| low contrast and have poor black levels, often further worsened
| by IPS glow.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| On TN panels, #000 looks horrible from bad angles (mostly
| below, from memory--it's years since I've had to endure a TN
| panel), and #1b1b1b _would_ actually look much better and
| even darker.
| kdazzle wrote:
| First time I read an argument against all black in design was
| this 2012 article. Something about it not being a color found
| in nature. Then, yeah, some people seemed to interpret it as
| "use gray on gray".
|
| https://ianstormtaylor.com/design-tip-never-use-black/
| amelius wrote:
| Funny, all these strange glyphs also don't seem to appear in
| nature ...
| gumby wrote:
| There is a theory that the reason those glyphs (in most
| languages, whether characters or ideograms) tend to have a
| similar, conservative aspect ratio is that they use a part
| of the early visual system that was useful in
| finding/tracking footprints (evidence of prey or threats)
|
| In the case of characters, especially hanzi/kanji, ones
| that are hard to recognize/distinguish either evolve
| (simplify and/or develop disambiguating features) or fall
| into disuse. Clearly "hard to recognize" is driven by
| physiological structures that are by definition "natural"
| amelius wrote:
| If true then why are Latin and Arabic glyphs so
| different?
| gumby wrote:
| I wrote "in most languages" specifically thinking of
| Arabic-derived scripts, but don't know of any others.
|
| Older scripts, and those descended from other roots, seem
| to have this property.
|
| Of course in practice Arabic writing is as easy or hard
| for humans to learn as any other system, so the
| evolutionary pressure/affordance to get rid of hard parts
| still applies.
|
| But the theory of early visual system affordance could in
| principle be studied (though I don't think fmri is really
| solid enough yet). Any historical implications of course
| will always have to remain theoretical.
|
| Writing has technological constraints as well; look at
| cuneiform vs, say, Pali. Since Arabic evolved after
| predecessor systems already existed, technological
| affordances clearly had a, or the, major influence.
|
| Edit: I read your comment again, and just to be clear:
| your question is really "why is Arabic different". Latin,
| Georgian, Aramaic, Brahmic, Chinese, Egyptian
| Hieroglyphs, Maya pictographs, all have roughly the same
| form factor.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| That is a very old lesson, for painting.
|
| A few things are truly black, because you don't get to see
| their color. But "nothing" has actually the color black.
|
| Anyway, even for painting, the fact that they have a paint
| for it means it happens on nature. It's just very rare, so
| everybody has to learn the lesson that no, you don't use
| black paint for that black thing you are seeing.
|
| For computer interfaces the entire thing is obviously
| bullshit since the beginning. But well, our area has a thing
| for accepting obvious bullshit.
| layer8 wrote:
| What this argument overlooks is that pure black also isn't
| found on computer displays. Even for OLED, black is really
| dark gray if you have any amount of ambient lighting.
| Displays are a part of nature in that sense.
| masswerk wrote:
| Mind that the site in question is from 2011 (compare the
| site-of-the-day link). So this is a reaction to trends even
| prior to this.
| pmontra wrote:
| Backlit screens are not found in nature too. Maybe 100% black
| is appropriate in that unnatural environment. It's great on
| my screen.
| over_bridge wrote:
| I feel like this website sold me on a problem then finished
| before reaching a solution. Was there advice on how to do better?
| Maybe I missed it.
| cabalamat wrote:
| Er, surely the solution is obvious? Just use higher contrast
| colour choices. And while we're at it, get rid of stupidly thin
| fonts.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Where's the rebellion part of this rebellion? I was hoping to
| light something on fire.
| wetpaws wrote:
| Ironically the web page is unreadable to me with all those yellow
| on black and black on yellow.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| I annoyingly had to zoom in and out to read some of the texts on
| this site on mobile.
|
| Not to mention the deplorable scroll-hijack.
|
| I think we may need a whole series of rebellions.
| gumby wrote:
| I'm in. I'll go fetch the tumbrils.
| coldfoundry wrote:
| [flagged]
| mavu wrote:
| can we extend this to hostile UIs? Please?
| panzi wrote:
| Semi-related: Several pharmacies sent brochures or similar
| material to my mom who doesn't see well anymore. All had
| extremely bad contrast and small writing using a narrow font with
| very thin stroke width. My mom couldn't read any of it. Do they
| not know their own target audience? Who is the main demographic
| of pharmacies!? WTF
|
| On the computer she can use high contrast mode and zoom in. Not
| possible on printed medium.
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