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Comment by creata | Hacker News Reader

> the site’s deliberate inaccessibility to visually impaired people

Can you expand? I naively thought that a site with markup as simple as HN's (zooming is flawless and it even works without JavaScript) would be very accessible to visually-impaired people.

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I should have worded this a little differently. I don’t know how accessible it is to someone who is actually blind or uses a screen reader. For all I know it’s great for them.

I do know the tiny text and low contrast make it hard to use for someone like me with older eyes. This is especially true on mobile, where the text refuses to resize in accordance to my phone’s large font settings.

I'm not the parent poster, but I hear where their coming from.

I'm not visually impaired, just in need of bifocals; I zoom HN to 150% and it works fine.

But I am kinda surprised when I turn the zoom off. Even 25 years ago that text would have looked small to me.

Color ratio of a typical comment on this web site:

https://contrast-ratio.com/#%23dddddd-on-%23f6f6ef

1.25, which is well below the minimum of 4.5

They ought to have a button to put on a high-contrast stylesheet, in fact I bet some hacker has already done it.

I'd assumed anyone with visual impairment—but not outright blindness requiring a screen-reader—was using custom stylesheet stuff pretty much constantly all over the web. Controlling the appearance of sites client-site used to be a basic browser feature. I know that's receded into the background, but is something similar (either some accessibility feature, or a plugin) not the norm for those who need them? If not, that sucks, because control used to be so firmly on the client-side for those things and that was a good thing.

I would not characterize the [dead] comments (which are #ddd) as "a typical comment". They're designed to be hard to read. If I turn off showdead (which I believe is an opt-in setting), it looks like the lightest comments are #9c9c9c, which is a 2.5 ratio (and of course are also comments which are intended to be less prominent).

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