Those are sort of outrageous examples. I find text shadow helps when I've got the contrast between the type and the background a little close. Text shadow can

Those are sort of outrageous examples. I find text shadow helps when I've got the contrast between the type and the background a little close. Text shadow can be used to subtly improve the contrast just around the letters. Done right users don't consciously know there is a text shadow but legibility is improved while maintaining a mellow set of colors. To be explicit, in HTML-5 land I would be talking about something like a 1 to 4 pixel wide shadow with say an hsla(0,0%,0%,0.25) color to darken a background around some lighter text.