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Comment by httpsterio | Hacker News Reader

There's a huge difference in having a surface that's white reflecting your room color versus having a display blasting light directly into your eyes.

Computer screens and paper are not comparable, they're physically different and they're not really even used in the same fashion. Yes, you can read off of both but you get the point.

You sound like a person who uses a terminal with a black bg and neon green text and claim that as superior. Maybe to you but surely not for the majority. Most likely that's not even optimal for you but you've just convinced yourself of that.

I get the frustration you seem to carry towards designers, but if you're blaming _all_ designers because some might utilize anti-patterns or you just have personal preferences that differ, you're kinda missing the woods for the trees.

You do realize that the chair you're sitting on, device you're writing on and building you're (likely) in are all designed by designers.

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> There's a huge difference in having a surface that's white reflecting your room color versus having a display blasting light directly into your eyes.

What's actually different between a photon of a given frequency that enters my eye after reflecting off a surface and a photon of the same frequency that enters my eye after being emitted from a display?

> You sound like a person who uses a terminal with a black bg and neon green text and claim that as superior. Maybe to you but surely not for the majority

BTW, in the CRT days green on black was actually objectively superior if you were using small fonts on most displays. That was because most displays would have slight misalignment of the red, green, and blue, especially near the edges, leading to color fringing around white things. For small text, the fringing could make text blurry and hard to read.

Pure green on black had no red or blue, so no fringing. Red on black or blue on black would have worked too, but most people find those much harder to read than green on black.

Because the light emitted from the LEDs of the display is focused towards your eyes by a very reflective film behind the panel while the light reflected off a book's page is heavily diffused due to the roughness of the paper.

The photons are not somehow "different" because of this.

> What's actually different between a photon of a given frequency that enters my eye after reflecting off a surface and a photon of the same frequency that enters my eye after being emitted from a display?

Nothing.

OTOH, the spectrum of photons emitted from maximally white and maximally black pixels on an LCD screen is probably nothing like those reflected from black ink or bright white paper under any realistic lighting conditions.

But "your room color" is not the same frequency as "display blasting light". The former will vary with time of day (some displays try to mimic that now).

I preferred amber monochrome, the ergonomic choice. Especially at night time.

Reading black text on a pure white computer screen capable of a decent contast ratio is more akin reading black text on tin foil with a studio light behind you.

Yes, you are of course right, technical limitations have had reasons in the past to use suboptimal solutions if we're talking about coloured pixels in CRT or LCD displays even but in today's world with our display technology there's no real reasons to use those other than personal preference.

About the photons, you could look into a regular paper sheet's or book page paper's albedo values and compare that to the light emitted from a led display, it's not even in the same ballpark. Why do you think people enjoy reading on an ebook reader rather than a normal tablet with a lcd/led display?

Artificial light strains our eyes way more than normal sunlight (or even indoor lighting) reflecting off of surfaces indirectly lighting everything for us.

> What's actually different between a photon of a given frequency

Well, none, of course. But the point is that white paper and a display's #FFFFFF probably won't send the same wavelength or number of photons into your eye.

One of them gives me a migraine after 5 minutes. I assume because light being reflected off a sheet of paper gets weaker, though I'm not sure how.

I think I have the right to blame them for creating accessibility nightmare which are unreadable without modifying CSS for many people while claiming it's a good helpful thing.

> You do realize that the chair you're sitting on, device you're writing on and building you're (likely) in are all designed by designers.

ANY designer having gone through design school can tell you that low contrast text is a no-non.

So maybe we should just say that the people doing designer jobs without learning about the basics of color, contrast and accessibility are unqualified to do their job in the same way a architect is unqualified if they design streets to small for cars or similar.

Btw. if you have problems with to bright whites (which I increasingly feel is related to OLEDS but that's just a wield guss). Make the background non-white but keep the text black or very close to black.

Also just to be clear I think no on is blaming all designers but just such which do thinks like gray on gray. And then believe it's all okay because their expensive OLED display displays it still kinda readable (again I'm just guessing about OLEDS, I think I have to make sure to get my hands on one to check that).

I didn't talk about low contrast at all, I specifically mentioned WCAG2.1 as it has set minimum contrast values for certain text sizes which should be readable. I forced my previous place of employment to take WCAG AA-level as a minimum for every UI element and created a separate high contrast mode for our product which fulfilled the AAA-levels even though we weren't legally obligated nor had any customer ever asked for it.

In the example (yellow on black) I mentioned has too much contrast and actually hinders readability for most people with a normal visual acuity as well as certain types of impairments.

Designers are also the ones responsible _for_ all the accessibility features and standards set to help developers implement accessible solutions.

If you're a software engineer who cares about contrast and studies different vision problems to figure out solutions for example, you're a designer in my book.

This is why I also specifically separated aesthetic and usable design. The former is more akin to "art" as it aims to simply look nice and I don't personally consider it design as design is problem solving and bad design just creates more.

I've always said that if a designer or web developer doesn't actively hinder accessibility, it's already a win in my book. It requires someone to make the decision to slap a #fafafa shaded text o top of a #ffffff background, semantic html and OS default colors go a long way if you don't know better.

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