
Contrast Rebellion - kartikkumar
http://contrastrebellion.com/
======
bsder
Yeah, and this website does grotty hacks to figure out my browser tab size and
scale--which makes me scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll on a 4K monitor.

He's an brilliant idea: quit trying to turn the web from scrolling text into a
damn slideshow. Thanks.

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carsongross
Auxiliary support provided by The Horde of Users Who Want Drop Shadow &
Gradient Easements In Their UI So They Can Tell What They Can Click On, or
THUWWDSGEITUISTCTWTCC, pronounced Thuh-Woods-Gheit-Eww-Tict-Wit-See.

------
dasil003
The critique of HN seems off-base. The low-contrast comments are the ones that
are downvoted and therefore the low-contrast is there _specifically_ to make
them less readable because they ostensibly deserve less attention.

~~~
pygy_
It also applies to the text of self-posts (tell/ask HN), which is what
_Contrast Rebellion_ points out.

~~~
sukilot
I think that is also intentional, to discourage self posts.

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zokier
I got a radical idea: do not touch the body text/background colors and let
user agent/browser pick the colors according to users preferences.

~~~
sneak
This is the case now: browsers are scriptable and every major browser has the
ability to install extensions to adjust nearly every single feature of a
page's text rendering with just a few clicks.

Turns out most people just don't care about typography.

~~~
nieve
There are just two little config changes that obviously no-one would ever care
about that make a lot of newer websites unusable: Setting a minimum font size
and/or forcing your own default can cause text to pile up, grow to insane
sizes, screw up column width that content becomes a tiny ribbon, or cause text
to render entirely offscreen. One of the main causes is the same kind of
control freak design that insists on low-contrast text - designers who want
some kind of pixel-perfect "responsive Photoshop" that ensures no user
anywhere can deviate from their choses appearance. The other is forced fonts
including icon fonts - designers are not better at figuring out what fonts a
user finds most readable (especially those with poor vision) and icon fonts
require turning off the users fonts and often enabling javascript.

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andybak
Many of the examples looked borderline to me. How much contrast is 'enough'?

Also - surely this is something that should be fixable in the OS or browser?
OSX has an high-contrast accessibility mode. Do we really need to fix this at
source?

~~~
hawkice
Good rule for contrast: If you would refer to the text color and background
color by the same word, that's not enough contrast. Compare the good contrast
examples, largely black on white or white on black, with the bad examples,
universally gray on gray (or off-white on off-white).

~~~
randallsquared
So, the fewer words you know to refer to colors, the more contrast matters to
you? :)

~~~
EliRivers
This rings a bell inside my head; given people from a language/culture with
two different words for what English speakers would identify as barely
different shades of the same colour, they are _objectively_ better at
identifying those two shades than the native English speaker. Which
essentially gives the answer "yes" to your question.

Here's a reference that might be what's ringing inside my head:
[http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11759-russian-
speakers...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11759-russian-speakers-get-
the-blues.html)

Particularly relevant quote: _" This is the first time that evidence has been
offered to show cross-linguistic differences in colour perception in an
objective task"_

Here's more: [https://eagereyes.org/blog/2011/you-only-see-colors-you-
can-...](https://eagereyes.org/blog/2011/you-only-see-colors-you-can-name)

~~~
krick
This "Russian experiment" is a bit weird, as though it's true that "синий"
usually refers to darker colors and "голубой" to the lighter ones, both colors
to chose from could be referred to as "синий" or "голубой" interchangeably.
Actually, it's not that clear what is "синий" and "голубой" anyway: sky is
like The "синий", but quite often referred to as "голубой" instead, but
somebody's eyes almost never are referred to as "синий": maybe only if you
want to emphasize how unusually bright they are. But if your dress would be
the same color as the eyes, it could be called "синий" easily.

What I'm trying to say, there's no that big difference between these two words
in Russian to explain the experiment results, unlike what was shown to us on
that video about some African tribe. More like "purple" and "violet" — there
clearly is a difference, but many people would fail even to point which one is
which, and some might even argue about that.

------
teh_klev
Discussion from last time around:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2807047](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2807047)

~~~
sukilot
It has been 4 years. Has the rebellion made gains?

~~~
kristopolous
I think not. I go into details here:
[http://unreadable.website/guide.html](http://unreadable.website/guide.html)
...

The biggest problem is the screen on say a MBP is different than an X240 or an
XPS13. Next time you are in a big box retailer look at them side-by-side -
each screen can access a quite dramatically different contrast and color
space.

So the low-contrast issue is a manifestation of the classic "works for me"
bug. A "cozy" distance on one display become irritatingly illegible on
another.

The WCAG2 ([http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/](http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/)) calls
for a 4.5:1 ratio ... make this 7:1 or so and you are good.

------
mrob
Despite praising high contrast, this site hypocritically throws away contrast
for no good reason. I can understand using non-white backgrounds, because it
can reduce glare, but using grey text is pure fashion. This site uses
color:#191919 text. As always, the only good solution is user CSS to set it to
#000000. I use the Stylish addon for Firefox to let me toggle this quickly for
sites with light or dark color schemes.

~~~
ricardobeat
Too much contrast is also bad, reducing blacks just a tiny bit reduces eye
strain in the average screen.

~~~
mrob
There's no chance of too much contrast on an LCD displaying dark text on a
light background. People have no trouble reading high quality print in
sunlight, and that has much higher contrast. Grey text is harder to read, as
demonstrated by the studies cited. Eg. this one finds pure 100% black on 100%
white is most legible:
[http://www.laurenscharff.com/research/agecontrast.html](http://www.laurenscharff.com/research/agecontrast.html)

Black text is the default, and changing it to grey only makes things worse.
This is superior web design to the vast majority of sites out there:
[http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/)

But note that excessive contrast _can_ harm legibility of light text on dark
background (although that color scheme is less legible, so it should be
reserved for cases where it has real benefits, eg. photo editing software,
where it makes it easier to see shadow detail).

~~~
ricardobeat
The _medium-high_ contrast setting they compared with would be equivalent of
#444444, much brighter than the #191919 used by the website. I find it
impossible to read a book in direct sunlight, and am pretty sure it's not just
me.

~~~
dredmorbius
The problem I notice is that anything other than _very_ slightly greyed font
appears blurry to me. #330 is as far as I'll take it.

Rather than lighten the text, darken the background lightly. #fffff8 is a good
start.

------
jkot
People should filter colors and fonts the same way they filter ads. Its easy.

~~~
DanBC
A tiny number of people filter ads.

Why should bad designers get to force a bunch of people to fix mistaken web
design choices?

~~~
mappu
_> A tiny number of people filter ads._

"41% of 18-29 year olds polled said they use adblock ... In some countries
nearly one quarter of the online population has it installed"

\-- [http://blog.pagefair.com/2014/adblocking-
report/](http://blog.pagefair.com/2014/adblocking-report/)

~~~
DanBC
> There are about 144 million active adblock users around the world.

That is a small number of people of the total Internet population.

It's a bit surprising that you think an advertiser pushing ads is a suitable
source for information about ad-blocking. Obviously they're going to say that
ad-blocking is prevalant and that you need to run better ads to stop people
running ad-blockers and oh, we just happen to be an ad company that runs that
particular type of ad.

~~~
mappu
It was the best source at hand, if you have another study i'd be interested to
hear it.

There's apparently 2.9bn internet users, so you're right that ~5% isn't a very
big number in context.

------
mikeash
It's ironic that this site is kind of hard to read in Mobile Safari.

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tsomctl
The following is a brain dump of an idea I have:

I've thought of writing a proxy server that parses pages before serving them
to you. It's goal would be to make webpages more readable, with sane font
sizes and colors. I'm tired of reading webpages on my iPhone that are
"optimized" for mobile where each line is 5 words. I could fit more text on
the screen of my first laptop, which had half the resolution. Also, blog posts
from medium.com currently crash mobile Safari.

Every website would require custom code. It's default failure mode would be to
just show the original web page. I don't want to have to fuck with it when
some page gets mangled and is completely unreadable.

~~~
prezjordan
Not a bad idea - but not there are services that do this by scraping the web
page (Instapaper, Readability, etc), rather than requiring a proxy.

I encourage you to check them out - maybe you can do even better.

------
eleumik
I am confident this rebellion will be one of the few that will succeed in
these days.

Why ? Because rebellions like revolutions need a critic mass of people and
well, we are getting very old here ;-)

------
kristopolous
I have something in the same spirit:
[http://unreadable.website](http://unreadable.website)

------
jacquesm
They may have gotten the contrast thing right but they totally messed up on
the fonts. I rarely comment on style because I think the substance is what we
should focus on but for a site that goes out of its way to criticize one
particular design parameter I don't get how they could mess up so badly on
another. That's just ugly.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Aesthetics and legibility are two different things. Lumping them both together
under "design parameters" misses the point.

------
dreamfactory2
Not sure about the aesthetics argument. Form follows function - if it
functions well it looks good, and vice versa. (What people sometimes miss is
that you aren't born with a sense of aesthetics/taste but it needs to be
learned and the above rule is a good way of improving your understanding of
what looks good.)

------
huac
Services like [https://readability.com/](https://readability.com/) certainly
help. To the extreme, let's have the equivalent of Photoshop's 'curves' filter
- map everything to either absolute black or absolute white.

------
Trombone12
dark background, Light Background!, dark background, Light Background!

Scrolling trough this page made my eyes hurt, did nobody test the transitions
when they set really dark and light backgrounds right after each other?

------
serve_yay
A rebellion. Yeah, it's a regular bunch of Pancho Villas over there. Boy oh
boy.

------
rayiner
Web design was perfected in 1454 when Gutenberg typeset his Bibles with dark
black text on light colored paper (also: with narrow, full-justified columns).
Deviation from that is abusive to your readers and an affront to common
decency.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Certainly publishers could have adopted the "gray on gray" fad at any
intervening time, _and saved money doing so_ (diluting the ink, no optical
brighteners or bleaching on the paper), but they didn't.

Only in the era of the web has deliberate illegibility somehow become trendy.

------
krick
Well, what I'm to say here… If you are site owner and you feel that colors
hurt conversion/number of visitors/time spent on page/whatever else you care
about — you probably should change the colors. If you are a visitor and you
feel that colors of the site you'd like to use discourage you to do so — you
probably need to help yourself and make a custom CSS of your own (using
Stylish or something) to satisfy your very unique needs or just use one of
many services like
[http://readable.tastefulwords.com/](http://readable.tastefulwords.com/) .

Anything else: rebel all you want, nobody fucking cares.

My personal humble opinion, btw: the "unreadable" examples are much more
readable and easier on the eyes, than eye-burning "readable" ones. So I could
as well go around rebelling about white on black or black on white, but I
won't, because it's stupid, I follow my own advices and use Pocketbook for
long reads anyway.

~~~
DanBC
> If you are a visitor and you feel that colors of the site you'd like to use
> discourage you to do so — you probably need to help yourself and make a
> custom CSS of your own

This attitude is hostile to a wide range of people who already have to fight
the computer to get things done and shouldn't have to fight the stupid
decisions made by bad designers.

> nobody fucking cares.

For various values of "nobody" including "some people", where some people
means any group subject to various disability discrimination laws in whatever
countries they operate in.

~~~
krick
Hostile? I would call it "fair". Because, ok, let's assume you win. I'm wrong,
you're right, and some ultimate dictator decides that all websites now are
coming in black-on-white only. What should I do, as a person that feels low-
contrast is much nicer than eye-burning one? Exactly, I'm about to make my own
customizations or suffer. And then you should be saying, that black-on-white
is hostile to me, which wouldn't make much sense, as you (or somebody else for
that matter) would have something to complain on either way.

Hence my first point about "if it hurts conversion/…". In other words, if it's
your business — it's your business. If it's not — well, you are free to
complain about other people coloring _their_ stuff as they like all you want,
but I hope they won't be upset about that, because they really shouldn't be,
and believing that your point of view is the only right one (even if it's
supported by some Nielsen or whatever) is simply ignorance.

~~~
DanBC
I agree that too high contrast is also wrong. Notice how the submitted website
does not use black text on a white background anywhere? No one is asking for
maximum contrast. People are asking for good contrast, and that includes "not
black on white".

