

Does text shadow increase text legibility - tamersalama
http://strd6.com/2010/11/does-text-shadow-increase-text-legibility/

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corin_
"Does white text on white background become more readable if you add some
black to the outside of the text?"

Shocking results!

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mrkurt
That post was way more interesting than you gave it credit for.

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Dramatize
Not really. Real world examples would have been more useful. I don't see
anyone arguing that white on white text is hard/easy to read.

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jerf
Everybody's right. Science wasn't necessary, it's obviously useful in a
limited set of circumstances. (One could argue that such text without contrast
shouldn't exist, but that's easier said than done in a dynamic environment
such as a game.) Zed's still right in the way he meant it, which was not about
those limited sets of circumstances.

In other news, the well-known true statement "the sky is blue" isn't actually
true. Right now it's black, studded with these little white spots. But we
still know what that means. Context.

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sahillavingia
The utility of text shadow really lies in the 3D aspect of it. If you have
white text, adding a black text-shadow at -1px distance makes the text look
inset. With black text, a white text-shadow at 1px distance works too.

It enhances contrast... and looks sexy. Win-win.

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jws
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.

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mcantor
_"I think there’s quite a bit of promise in the technique of using “real”
statistical evidence to back up claims."_

That, or, you got punked into blasting a hundred bucks by Zed Shaw via
Twitter...

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Yahivin
$10.50

But practicing science with simple, practically trivial, experiments can make
it easier to do real science on more difficult examples in the future.

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Dramatize
<http://socket.io/> is a good example of it making it harder to read.

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codefisher
I don't know, the contract between the background and the text is low already,
so making it worse would be kind of hard.

I like using a drop shadow on headings or other important bits of text that
have been placed on something that causes the contrast to be low. But I try to
make it so it is not obvious it is there, just subtle.

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stevenwei
I just tried turning off the shadow there and the text is _much_ more
readable. It's actually plain white text but the 1px black drop shadow makes
it more difficult to read against the blue background.

