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Comment by mmackh | Hacker News Reader

Author here: Sorry for not considering accessibility more. I use solarize everywhere - I’ll look into fixing the low contrast issue. As for whether my approach is correct from an SEO or HTML5 validation perspective - evidently not. But I do value the feedback and will take your comments into consideration when expanding my personal site. It’s still a WIP.

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Note that when people speak of colour contrast ratios, they’re looking at a painfully simplified model that is useful, but nowhere near sufficient. The most significant way in which it is insufficient is the consideration of font weights: thinner fonts need higher contrast to be legible. This is particularly seriously demonstrated here by the use of the monospace font-family: some platforms have a default monospaced font that is way thinner than others (like, weight 250–300 instead of 400), and so Solarized, which I find unpleasantly low-contrast even with a fairly heavy font, becomes positively awful.

You could also override the font-family of the main <code> to make it more readable; since it isn't code there's no need to use a monospace font.

    body code {
        font-family: sans-serif;
    }

I'm also a huge fan of solarized, so I know from some styling experiments with LaTeX documents that solarized just has a bit too little contrast for normal text documents. Which is why I'd recommend adjusting the text brightness - it still looks relatively similar but helps significantly.

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