Hacker News Reader

Comment by TimWolla | Hacker News Reader

I found it perfectly readable and checked with Firefox' accessibility tools: The contrast of the main text is a 12.19 and thus meets the WCAG AAA standards for accessible text. [1] is the documentation Firefox links to.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/U...

View on HN

The page has a different (lighter) text colour for dark mode but the background colour doesn't change on dark mode, making it nearly unreadable.

The Firefox tools tell me it has a contrast of 1.43

Yep, that's it. Turns out, Safari/Chrome change the page background automatically based on your OS setting. FF seems not to.

I find this response hilarious, because you jumped to a standard to make your argument without considering that what you are seeing may not match what others are seeing.

The page is super hard to read with the white background it has in Firefox, but fine with the dark background it has in Chrome.

I.e., the problem is that the website sometimes renders with a white background and very light pink text.

> the dark background it has in Chrome

...eh? https://i.imgur.com/Qwn7A4f.png

Maybe it's random? I get the dark in Chrome and white in Firefox.

Oh, word? Mine's at 1.43. https://imgur.com/a/AVQxh20

Contrast isn't the only indicator of readability. The font choice here is IMHO terrible for screen. It's much too thin.

Taking this to the logical extreme - just for fun - imagine a the perfect contrast score of Vantablack™ on Spectralon white. It wouldn't matter if the typeface stroke widths were only a micron wide. It would still be unreadable.

This is why metrics versus real world measurement are at odds. Sure, measure the luminance all you want; sure ignore the fact that color spaces and visual impairment aren't evenly distributed. But don't tell someone they can see something they can't.

I was not telling anyone that they must be able to see this properly. I was saying that I was able to see this properly and I was saying that according to an established standard it should be as readable as it gets.

Sure, the standard might be lacking, but then the standard should be fixed. As a website author you need something to refer to when you don't experience these issues yourself.

> Sure, the standard might be lacking, but then the standard should be fixed. As a website author you need something to refer to when you don't experience these issues yourself.

The problem is that it’s the wrong standard that’s lacking. WCAG does the best it can with the web specs, but it can’t just impose a perceptual color space on HTML/CSS, and it would be impossible for mere mortals to evaluate a perceptual contrast standard on RGB/HSL.

But you can easily find A11y articles pointing out where the contrast ratios which pass or fail are very flawed for even people with good vision.

Just because you find it readable does not mean others can; also, color contrast is not the only thing that affects readability. In this case, the issue is font weight.

Here's some discussion on the issue: https://github.com/w3c/wcag/issues/665

Reply on news.ycombinator.com