4 ms·

Don't do accessibility just for the disabled. Normal people are slowed down by today's graphics design for websites, too. If it's thin and gray on your retina d

by megous 8y ago

Don't do accessibility just for the disabled. Normal people are slowed down by today's graphics design for websites, too. If it's thin and gray on your retina display, guess how it looks on my 13year old monitor with washed out CFL, or on cheap phone outside when the sun is shining. How it looks when your stupid website is presented on the wall projector (you know, on a meeting to a group of people deciding whether to buy your service subscription or not), or printed on the paper. Reading mode had to be invented, so that many websites could actually be read.

aasasd 8y ago
Thin and light text also merges with the background when a red filter is enabled―which are becoming more popular and are now included in OSes.
waste_monk 8y ago
Why should developers cater for users who are running severely outdated hardware? I don't disagree with you, I was running an ancient laptop as my main box until a few months ago, so I know first-hand how frustrating it is. It's hard to play games or watch videos with only 128mb VRAM and almost no shader/codec acceleration support!. But at the same time, it greatly increases the variety of devices and standards you need to support (there's a pretty huge gap between a 10 year old machine and a modern one, but 3 or 5 years are reasonably similar), and thus blows out the scope and difficulty of creating and maintaining a system. As a programmer, it's quite frustrating when removing support for outdated hardware / operating systems could make a system so much cleaner. Then there's security considerations, e.g. if you have to leave deprecated versions of SSL enabled to support outdated clients, that weakens the entire system.
- nerdponx 8y ago
  12 pt Times New Roman white on black works pretty well on old hardware.
- megous 8y ago
  > Why should developers cater for users who are running severely outdated hardware? They don't have to. I know how to fix the font width via developer tools. But many people don't and devs can then hardly go and complain that their websites are losing audience or have high bounce rates. Also this is mostly about respect for displays people may be using to view the website. There's nothing that much outdated about an old display. It just has lessened brightness/contrast. You don't have to support it in any way and there are no security implications.

by megous 8y ago

aasasd 8y ago

Thin and light text also merges with the background when a red filter is enabled―which are becoming more popular and are now included in OSes.

waste_monk 8y ago

Why should developers cater for users who are running severely outdated hardware? I don't disagree with you, I was running an ancient laptop as my main box until a few months ago, so I know first-hand how frustrating it is. It's hard to play games or watch videos with only 128mb VRAM and almost no shader/codec acceleration support!. But at the same time, it greatly increases the variety of devices and standards you need to support (there's a pretty huge gap between a 10 year old machine and a modern one, but 3 or 5 years are reasonably similar), and thus blows out the scope and difficulty of creating and maintaining a system. As a programmer, it's quite frustrating when removing support for outdated hardware / operating systems could make a system so much cleaner. Then there's security considerations, e.g. if you have to leave deprecated versions of SSL enabled to support outdated clients, that weakens the entire system.

nerdponx 8y ago
12 pt Times New Roman white on black works pretty well on old hardware.
megous 8y ago
> Why should developers cater for users who are running severely outdated hardware? They don't have to. I know how to fix the font width via developer tools. But many people don't and devs can then hardly go and complain that their websites are losing audience or have high bounce rates. Also this is mostly about respect for displays people may be using to view the website. There's nothing that much outdated about an old display. It just has lessened brightness/contrast. You don't have to support it in any way and there are no security implications.