6 ms·

> But they should be #000 or close to it You should use moderation. Guidelines for accessibility suggest a 3:1 contrast ratio as the minimum contrast level, bu

by lhorie 5y ago

> But they should be #000 or close to it You should use moderation. Guidelines for accessibility suggest a 3:1 contrast ratio as the minimum contrast level, but having too much contrast can also make reading more difficult (e.g. for people w/ dislexia)

imachine1980_ 5y ago
Not only that (dyslexic) but I see blurry faster if I Read epub whit black and white than Grey and white
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  And some people can't really see writing at all if it's grey and white. The best solution is user agents that actually convey a modicum of agency to the user. The second-best solution is adjusting your monitor; most monitors, you can reduce the contrast, but you can't really increase it.
layer8 5y ago
Black text on white background (#000 on #fff) used to be standard on computer displays, and still is for many desktop applications. The expectation is that one's display is set to a reasonable brightness & contrast settings for that, which usually means less than 50% brightness setting. In addition, as the GP notes, black usually isn't very black on LCD displays (IPS panels in particular). Web sites using noticably lower text contrast are bad in that one has to constantly adjust the display settings depending on the web site or app. Having less-than-optimal eyesight, I struggle with anything significantly less than pure black on white for running text, with regular contrast/brightness settings.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  There's definitely a specific reasonable brightness level for #fff, depending on room brightness, somewhere in the realm of 200 nits. But I think a reasonable setting for #000 is "as dark as it goes". It doesn't seem right to depend on screen settings to control the contrast against black.
- lhorie 5y ago
  > Having less-than-optimal eyesight Do you use custom setups to browse the web? I'm curious what your thoughts are on color schemes such as HN's or Google's. Those aren't #000 on #fff but also aren't egregious super low contrast either, and at least to me, moderately high contrast palettes are easier on my eyes when I'm situationally reading in a dark room than pure black on white.
  - layer8 5y ago
    On Firefox I use the "Font Contrast" add-on. HN is acceptable (barely) on OLED mobile for me, but I’d prefer a white background and blacker text (like e.g. reddit). On other displays I often compensate by increasing the font size, but obviously that’s not optimal.
- junon 5y ago
  Since you have eyesight considerations, I'm curious: what about white on black (#fff on #000)? Is there any noticeable impact, positive or negative, over black-on-white?
  - jakear 5y ago
    For my eyes black on white is far superior. White on black results in haloing around all text, whereas black on white results in generally pretty crisp text. This is why I use light themes and high-contrast mode for anything that supports it. (The glaring exception is Spotify) The basic idea is that for folks with blurred vision (not out of focus, literally blurred), bright colors will erode into dark surroundings. Dark text on light background means the text is uniformly slightly lighter than "ground truth", light text on dark background means a distracting halo forms around the text.
    - junon 5y ago
      The halo coming from your own vision, not as an artifact of the LCD screen or something like that, right? Thanks for the information, this is interesting to note!
      - layer8 5y ago
        Not the GP, but yes, it's a perceptual effect from one's own vision.
    - sleightofmind 5y ago
      This. A thousand times. I'm an oldster -- and no, 40 is not old. My vision varies from dead sharp to blurry depending on eye fatigue, probably blood sugar levels, and how my rather large floaters are behaving. But by the end of a day of reading, it's almost guaranteed that my eyes will be blurry from fatigue and age-related stiffness, complicated by that modern-day miracle -- replacement lenses for cataracts. As a consequence, reading any light text on dark background when my eyes are blurry is just a mess of haloing. The haloing bleeds three or four lines above and below the line I am reading, creating a big fuzzy mess that's annoying and hard to read. To be clear when I mention floaters, I don't mean the little black squigglies that everyone experiences at any age. Rather mine are more like floating but not completely un-anchored translucent blurs that move right when my eyes move left. I suspect mine are Weiss rings. Know that all that time you spent choosing a font color that is one-level of gray removed from invisible ink will never be enjoyed by me. I've overridden the the default font and font color in my browser to be a nice large, heavy, mono-spaced black font. When my eyes are fresh, yeah, I can read your 300-weight pseudo-invisible ink just fine, but it flatly irritates me, hence the overrides. And right click inspect is my boon companion when reading any page too-trendily designed. If you're less than 40, it's hard to appreciate how age changes one's eyes. So if you're a youngster, have a bit of sympathy for us old folks when choosing color schemes. Or don't. I'm happy you can do creative, and that those of us with less-than-youthful vision can make adjustments. Best of both worlds.
- mech422 5y ago
  It might have been standard on web pages... But there was a reason green screens and especially amber/yellow displays were popular long after color displays came out... I still find amber on black one of the easiest color schemes to read. edit: s/on/one/
  - layer8 5y ago
    I used to be quite fond of the amber CRTs, and still am from an aesthetic point of view. Also, for roughly my first decade of programming I used white text on blue background almost exclusively. So I get those who like dark mode. But eventually me and my eyes got older.
    - mech422 5y ago
      yeah - I find as I get older, I prefer a darker environment for working on the computer (turn of the room lights, etc) and a bright(blinding!) environment for working with my hands ;-) (Where did that #%$#% screw go!) I also find, I'm _waaayy_ more annoyed by smudges on my glasses then when I was younger.
  - fsckboy 5y ago
    >there was a reason green screens and especially amber/yellow displays were popular long after color displays came out... yes, and the reason was the fuzzy-blurryness of color display technology at that time, and the fact that those in the industry were already used to monochrome displays and had workflows and settings adapted to monochrome. Once color display quality became high enough, monochrome demand completely evaporated. I'm not saying that there is nothing nice about a monochrome display, and displaying light on black (my terminal and emacs windows are still black background, with a distinct fondness for green; I too am an old-timer), but still...
    - mech422 5y ago
      >>yes, and the reason was the fuzzy-blurryness of color display technology at that time, and the fact that those in the industry were already used to monochrome displays and had workflows and settings adapted to monochrome. Once color display quality became high enough, monochrome demand completely evaporated. Eh? no one had color back then.. You had monochrome - you just got to pick which color you wanted: white, yellow, amber or green. And I never saw monochrome demand 'evaporate' - I saw lots of new people come into computing in the 90s that wanted color for games, photo editing, whatever. edit: what I mean is, there weren't enough of us 'text only' people to make it worth while for manufacturers with the armies of new users coming in with games, gui's and all that
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Black text on white background (#000 on #fff) used to be standard on computer displays Aside from computers with built in (e.g., early Macs) or external TV-style displays that had no color support (e.g., Timex Sinclair 1000), and later Macs even though they had color support, that doesn't seem to have ever been common, even on other machines of the same time. EDIT: It was common on word processing, desktop publishing, and some other apps once WYSIWYG became a big trend, but that was pretty explicitly about print-on-white-paper skeumorphism, not an idea of what was ideal for work on a computer outside of the specific context of mirroring what print would look like.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > Black text on white background (#000 on #fff) used to be standard on computer displays, and still is for many desktop applications. The expectation is that one's display is set to a reasonable brightness & contrast settings for that Tangentially, original Kindles render black text on a gray background, and it's great. Books use white paper and will hurt your eyes with glare if you read them outdoors. But somehow Amazon has decided that gray is only for their cheapest, crappiest model, and you should be excited about the "PaperWhite" "option". I don't get it.
  - yoz-y 5y ago
    That gray is a hardware limitation and the white isn’t show white either.
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      > That gray is a hardware limitation The gray is markedly superior to the white. It may be a hardware feature, but it's not a "limitation".
      - yoz-y 5y ago
        It would be nice if the default background color was a choice rather than a price point. Personally I like reading in dimly lit rooms or subway rather than outside, so a brighter “paper” is an advantage. But I definitely understand that for reading on a beach you would like a darker one.
wffurr 5y ago
3:1 isn't anywhere close to enough. That's the recommendation for graphics and UI components. For body text, WCAG suggests 7:1 and even that can be too light if the font is a thin style or is small. Not to mention the various environmental factors that affect the contrast ratio in practice. Crappy LCDs in poorly lit environments rendering with buggy software. Err on the side of darker is better. Here's an eminently readable site. Now sure it doesn't use #000 but it's also way more than 3:1 contrast ratio and uses reasonably sized generously-bodied fonts: https://www.contrastrebellion.com/ https://www.contrastrebellion.com/
- graycat 5y ago
  Your https://www.contrastrebellion.com/ https://www.contrastrebellion.com/ has my thoughts exactly (gee, I'm actually not the only one!) except usually I'm not just thinking but screaming until I have a sore throat. So, finally I agree with the Web site designer: Since clearly they don't want people to read their site, I won't read their site and, thus, just click away and intend never to return. There is a special case of this gripe -- graphs. When I do graphs, say, in Excel, I spend over half the time just fighting the defaults. I want the fonts large, just BLACK, and BOLD. For the axes and tick marks, BLACK and THICK. I want to be able clearly to SEE the data and to READ the axis annotation. E.g., I'm on a diet of about 1500 C a day. I keep careful data and occasionally graph it. Sure, I want to print the graphs on my black and white only laser printer to give, say, to a nurse at a clinic. Soooo, I want the graph to be super easy to read once printed on my black and white printer. The site https://www.contrastrebellion.com/ https://www.contrastrebellion.com/ mentions, what was it, some artistic or emotional goals? Well, it appears in most graphs that finally do make it into the content of the mainstream media (MSM), the intention is that the line for the data be an emotional expression, say, of a thrust of eureka up and to the right. So, they go for art (communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion) instead of data analysis. Graphs in papers in physics and engineering commonly are nicely done! What is in common on many Web sites and graphs in the MSM seems to be a goal of an emotional expression instead of information. I'm in favor of a lot of emotional expression for both fun and profit. And if my Web site works, e.g., helps my users have good emotional reactions, then I will want to analyze and, at times, graph the profit, and there I care only about, call it, data analysis, e.g., information presented clearly and explicitly. To "circle back", when a site has text, I want to be able to read the text! I know; I know: On a Web page with text that maybe artistically something or other but super tough to read, I can grab the HTML and use various text editor macros I have to rip out the HTML markup, leave the text, format the text, and then read it in my favorite text editor. THIS is what the Web site designer had in mind?
simondotau 5y ago
If too much contrast is a problem for someone, that should be solved on the client side. And arguably by the operating system not the web browser.

by lhorie 5y ago

imachine1980_ 5y ago

Not only that (dyslexic) but I see blurry faster if I Read epub whit black and white than Grey and white

wizzwizz4 5y ago
And some people can't really see writing at all if it's grey and white. The best solution is user agents that actually convey a modicum of agency to the user. The second-best solution is adjusting your monitor; most monitors, you can reduce the contrast, but you can't really increase it.

layer8 5y ago

Black text on white background (#000 on #fff) used to be standard on computer displays, and still is for many desktop applications. The expectation is that one's display is set to a reasonable brightness & contrast settings for that, which usually means less than 50% brightness setting. In addition, as the GP notes, black usually isn't very black on LCD displays (IPS panels in particular). Web sites using noticably lower text contrast are bad in that one has to constantly adjust the display settings depending on the web site or app. Having less-than-optimal eyesight, I struggle with anything significantly less than pure black on white for running text, with regular contrast/brightness settings.

Dylan16807 5y ago
There's definitely a specific reasonable brightness level for #fff, depending on room brightness, somewhere in the realm of 200 nits. But I think a reasonable setting for #000 is "as dark as it goes". It doesn't seem right to depend on screen settings to control the contrast against black.
lhorie 5y ago
> Having less-than-optimal eyesight Do you use custom setups to browse the web? I'm curious what your thoughts are on color schemes such as HN's or Google's. Those aren't #000 on #fff but also aren't egregious super low contrast either, and at least to me, moderately high contrast palettes are easier on my eyes when I'm situationally reading in a dark room than pure black on white.
- layer8 5y ago
  On Firefox I use the "Font Contrast" add-on. HN is acceptable (barely) on OLED mobile for me, but I’d prefer a white background and blacker text (like e.g. reddit). On other displays I often compensate by increasing the font size, but obviously that’s not optimal.
junon 5y ago
Since you have eyesight considerations, I'm curious: what about white on black (#fff on #000)? Is there any noticeable impact, positive or negative, over black-on-white?
- jakear 5y ago
  For my eyes black on white is far superior. White on black results in haloing around all text, whereas black on white results in generally pretty crisp text. This is why I use light themes and high-contrast mode for anything that supports it. (The glaring exception is Spotify) The basic idea is that for folks with blurred vision (not out of focus, literally blurred), bright colors will erode into dark surroundings. Dark text on light background means the text is uniformly slightly lighter than "ground truth", light text on dark background means a distracting halo forms around the text.
  - junon 5y ago
    The halo coming from your own vision, not as an artifact of the LCD screen or something like that, right? Thanks for the information, this is interesting to note!
    - layer8 5y ago
      Not the GP, but yes, it's a perceptual effect from one's own vision.
  - sleightofmind 5y ago
    This. A thousand times. I'm an oldster -- and no, 40 is not old. My vision varies from dead sharp to blurry depending on eye fatigue, probably blood sugar levels, and how my rather large floaters are behaving. But by the end of a day of reading, it's almost guaranteed that my eyes will be blurry from fatigue and age-related stiffness, complicated by that modern-day miracle -- replacement lenses for cataracts. As a consequence, reading any light text on dark background when my eyes are blurry is just a mess of haloing. The haloing bleeds three or four lines above and below the line I am reading, creating a big fuzzy mess that's annoying and hard to read. To be clear when I mention floaters, I don't mean the little black squigglies that everyone experiences at any age. Rather mine are more like floating but not completely un-anchored translucent blurs that move right when my eyes move left. I suspect mine are Weiss rings. Know that all that time you spent choosing a font color that is one-level of gray removed from invisible ink will never be enjoyed by me. I've overridden the the default font and font color in my browser to be a nice large, heavy, mono-spaced black font. When my eyes are fresh, yeah, I can read your 300-weight pseudo-invisible ink just fine, but it flatly irritates me, hence the overrides. And right click inspect is my boon companion when reading any page too-trendily designed. If you're less than 40, it's hard to appreciate how age changes one's eyes. So if you're a youngster, have a bit of sympathy for us old folks when choosing color schemes. Or don't. I'm happy you can do creative, and that those of us with less-than-youthful vision can make adjustments. Best of both worlds.
mech422 5y ago
It might have been standard on web pages... But there was a reason green screens and especially amber/yellow displays were popular long after color displays came out... I still find amber on black one of the easiest color schemes to read. edit: s/on/one/
- layer8 5y ago
  I used to be quite fond of the amber CRTs, and still am from an aesthetic point of view. Also, for roughly my first decade of programming I used white text on blue background almost exclusively. So I get those who like dark mode. But eventually me and my eyes got older.
  - mech422 5y ago
    yeah - I find as I get older, I prefer a darker environment for working on the computer (turn of the room lights, etc) and a bright(blinding!) environment for working with my hands ;-) (Where did that #%$#% screw go!) I also find, I'm _waaayy_ more annoyed by smudges on my glasses then when I was younger.
- fsckboy 5y ago
  >there was a reason green screens and especially amber/yellow displays were popular long after color displays came out... yes, and the reason was the fuzzy-blurryness of color display technology at that time, and the fact that those in the industry were already used to monochrome displays and had workflows and settings adapted to monochrome. Once color display quality became high enough, monochrome demand completely evaporated. I'm not saying that there is nothing nice about a monochrome display, and displaying light on black (my terminal and emacs windows are still black background, with a distinct fondness for green; I too am an old-timer), but still...
  - mech422 5y ago
    >>yes, and the reason was the fuzzy-blurryness of color display technology at that time, and the fact that those in the industry were already used to monochrome displays and had workflows and settings adapted to monochrome. Once color display quality became high enough, monochrome demand completely evaporated. Eh? no one had color back then.. You had monochrome - you just got to pick which color you wanted: white, yellow, amber or green. And I never saw monochrome demand 'evaporate' - I saw lots of new people come into computing in the 90s that wanted color for games, photo editing, whatever. edit: what I mean is, there weren't enough of us 'text only' people to make it worth while for manufacturers with the armies of new users coming in with games, gui's and all that
dragonwriter 5y ago
> Black text on white background (#000 on #fff) used to be standard on computer displays Aside from computers with built in (e.g., early Macs) or external TV-style displays that had no color support (e.g., Timex Sinclair 1000), and later Macs even though they had color support, that doesn't seem to have ever been common, even on other machines of the same time. EDIT: It was common on word processing, desktop publishing, and some other apps once WYSIWYG became a big trend, but that was pretty explicitly about print-on-white-paper skeumorphism, not an idea of what was ideal for work on a computer outside of the specific context of mirroring what print would look like.
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> Black text on white background (#000 on #fff) used to be standard on computer displays, and still is for many desktop applications. The expectation is that one's display is set to a reasonable brightness & contrast settings for that Tangentially, original Kindles render black text on a gray background, and it's great. Books use white paper and will hurt your eyes with glare if you read them outdoors. But somehow Amazon has decided that gray is only for their cheapest, crappiest model, and you should be excited about the "PaperWhite" "option". I don't get it.
- yoz-y 5y ago
  That gray is a hardware limitation and the white isn’t show white either.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    > That gray is a hardware limitation The gray is markedly superior to the white. It may be a hardware feature, but it's not a "limitation".
    - yoz-y 5y ago
      It would be nice if the default background color was a choice rather than a price point. Personally I like reading in dimly lit rooms or subway rather than outside, so a brighter “paper” is an advantage. But I definitely understand that for reading on a beach you would like a darker one.

wffurr 5y ago

3:1 isn't anywhere close to enough. That's the recommendation for graphics and UI components. For body text, WCAG suggests 7:1 and even that can be too light if the font is a thin style or is small. Not to mention the various environmental factors that affect the contrast ratio in practice. Crappy LCDs in poorly lit environments rendering with buggy software. Err on the side of darker is better. Here's an eminently readable site. Now sure it doesn't use #000 but it's also way more than 3:1 contrast ratio and uses reasonably sized generously-bodied fonts: https://www.contrastrebellion.com/ https://www.contrastrebellion.com/

graycat 5y ago
Your https://www.contrastrebellion.com/ https://www.contrastrebellion.com/ has my thoughts exactly (gee, I'm actually not the only one!) except usually I'm not just thinking but screaming until I have a sore throat. So, finally I agree with the Web site designer: Since clearly they don't want people to read their site, I won't read their site and, thus, just click away and intend never to return. There is a special case of this gripe -- graphs. When I do graphs, say, in Excel, I spend over half the time just fighting the defaults. I want the fonts large, just BLACK, and BOLD. For the axes and tick marks, BLACK and THICK. I want to be able clearly to SEE the data and to READ the axis annotation. E.g., I'm on a diet of about 1500 C a day. I keep careful data and occasionally graph it. Sure, I want to print the graphs on my black and white only laser printer to give, say, to a nurse at a clinic. Soooo, I want the graph to be super easy to read once printed on my black and white printer. The site https://www.contrastrebellion.com/ https://www.contrastrebellion.com/ mentions, what was it, some artistic or emotional goals? Well, it appears in most graphs that finally do make it into the content of the mainstream media (MSM), the intention is that the line for the data be an emotional expression, say, of a thrust of eureka up and to the right. So, they go for art (communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion) instead of data analysis. Graphs in papers in physics and engineering commonly are nicely done! What is in common on many Web sites and graphs in the MSM seems to be a goal of an emotional expression instead of information. I'm in favor of a lot of emotional expression for both fun and profit. And if my Web site works, e.g., helps my users have good emotional reactions, then I will want to analyze and, at times, graph the profit, and there I care only about, call it, data analysis, e.g., information presented clearly and explicitly. To "circle back", when a site has text, I want to be able to read the text! I know; I know: On a Web page with text that maybe artistically something or other but super tough to read, I can grab the HTML and use various text editor macros I have to rip out the HTML markup, leave the text, format the text, and then read it in my favorite text editor. THIS is what the Web site designer had in mind?

simondotau 5y ago

If too much contrast is a problem for someone, that should be solved on the client side. And arguably by the operating system not the web browser.