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Despite claiming to promote high contrast text, this website is medium contrast at best. Their "black" text is #191919, not #000000 as it should be. Printer ton
by mrob 9y ago
Despite claiming to promote high contrast text, this website is medium contrast at best. Their "black" text is #191919, not #000000 as it should be. Printer toner and carbon black based inks are frequently darker than #000000 on a typical screen, and nobody complains about them being too dark.
In the case of white being darker than #ffffff, you can at least argue that most users have their monitors configured too bright (it's too bright by default because that looks better for a short term comparison, and most people don't change the defaults), so darker whites are compensating for that. There's no good reason to make black text gray.
- lnanek2 9y agoI agree and prefer black blacks. It's very common in design books to say that's an absolute no-no, however. So graphics people must think it looks better somehow.
- mrob 9y agoEven for body text? I've seen advice that titles should be gray, but that's to make it subjectively match black body text, because bigger text looks darker.
- mallaidh 9y agoFunny how that changes all of a sudden, with the whole history of printing being an effort to get as close as possible to perfectly black ink on perfectly white paper.
- alanh 9y agoSo wrong. #191919 is very high contrast. Many/most sites use #333 for the text most of us perceive as "black". You can also check contrast ratios on a number of sites and you will see that #191919 & #fff make a pair that pass all guidelines at all text sizes.