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Comment by lucb1e | Hacker News Reader

Meta: the grey text thing which seems to be really popular right now? That's just unreadable. Third time today I inspect-elemented a blog post to turn the text coloring off.

Edit: Finished reading, what a great project! I've looked for something like this before, but ssh documentation never quite contained what I was looking for, let alone providing a simple client to hack with.

Many code snippets look a lot easier than I would expect it to be (e.g. DH KEX looks very simple there), though of course finding out what the correct code is, even if it's brief, takes a lot of effort.

Great writeup and thanks for sharing!

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Check your monitor gamma and white level using something like this: http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/gamma_calibration.php

You might be crushing whites, or just have incorrect gamma.

Many users don't have expensive monitors, so they can't calibrate the monitor successfully. This is a problem when many web designers only test their site on a mac in a nicely lot office.

http://contrastrebellion.com/ !

Thanks for the link! I've seen the site before but never thought of testing my screen when I got my new laptop.

It's very difficult to tell, though. The gamma varies between 1.9 and 2.3 (roughly) depending on the angle at which I look at my screen. Every time I sit this will be different.

Opening the article again, it also depends where I look: when tilting my laptop back a bit, the text appears darker (even black if I tilt it far enough) but the exact shade differs: near the bottom of the page it's still greyish while the top part is indeed almost black.

Looking on my phone, it's a lot better readable than on my laptop, probably because I look at my laptop screen at an angle and my phone's colors don't change if you look from the far top or bottom.

The worst color change I recall seeing on a laptop was the background color Google used to use to identify ads (a pale yellow as I recall). On cheaper laptop screens even the slightest tilt would make it white, making the ads indistinguishable from real results.

If you have something like the Nvidia Linux control panel for adjusting colors, lowering the white level and raising the black level can help compensate a bit. The open source Media Player Classic (or MPC-HC maybe) player also has a nice shader to correct for the vertical variation, but I don't know of any way to apply it to the whole OS.

If the author is reading this, I always find it useful to run HTML CodeSniffer [1] to find contrast accessibility violations. It gives you the closest colour that meets the contrast requirements. With a few small colour tweaks, I got the number of WCAG AA violations down from 115 errors to 17 (the remainder are primarily contrast issues with the code blocks).

P.S. Loved the article!

[1] https://squizlabs.github.io/HTML_CodeSniffer/

You know about "reader mode", right? http://www.howtogeek.com/228104/how-to-make-the-mobile-web-m...

It's very odd to have to depend on a browser feature that is basically for accessibility in order to read a website because the colour choices are bad.

It's weird to me that people want millions of random people controlling how content is visually presented; aka, wish the web would die already.

You can cry creative freedom all you want, the colour choices make it hard for certain people (with visual difficulties) to read the site. Not accepting that and improving the design is basically saying "my creative freedom is more important than people actually reading the website".

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