That being said, yes; awful low-contrast sites exist. But it's not, hah, black and white. There's certainly such a thing as too high of a contrast - depending on the person, monitor, and background light.
It's medium gray on light gray. It's #828282 against #F6F6EF, a contrast ratio of 3.54:1 which is a fail. WCAG 2.0 level AA requires at least 4.5:1 for normal text. This isn't subjective or aesthetics, it's an objective measurement.
It's genuinely uncomfortable to read when it's a long "Tell HN" or similar.
> There's certainly such a thing as too high of a contrast
Not really, as long as you can adjust your screen brightness. That's what screen brightness is for. You can always decrease contrast that's too high, but you can't increase it much if it starts too low.
I’m going to push back against this slightly (I’m not disagreeing that the HN contrast is bad, but I am challenging the WCAG ratios). It’s objective, but it’s not a good measurement. WCAG computes contrast in sRGB, which is not perceptually uniform. As such there are cases where WCAG will give better scores to worse contrast. For example, the WCAG math prefers black text on a medium blue background to white text on a medium blue background, which is the exact inverse to what most people feel is most legible.
https://github.com/w3c/wcag/issues/695
It’s the biggest thing I wish would be changed in the WCAG.
Its an objective measurement, but whether the standard is correct or not is a subjective question of aesthetics. Or it could be empirical question if there qas a performance goal tied to it, and it was a testable proposition whether the objective measure corresponded to the performance goal optimally (sibling comment addressing perceptual uniformity suggests that for any given performance goal, that probably is not the case.)
I've been thinking the same thing.
I think making them unreadable is the point?
As for downvoted posts, eh, it would be better to collapse them by default or something instead of showing them but making them unreadable.
It's a bit off though, since it e.g. also applies to the "officially selected" Launch HN: posts.
For the designer it might be "a bit inconvenient to read", and for somebody else it might be "literally impossible to read".
Arguably the best feature of the web is that any content can be zoomed in and out as much as one pleases without problems. It does break on some websites, but as someone who zooms in most content I find it's relatively rare.
If you make text large you will have people complaining the text is too large. If you make text small you will have people complaining the text is too small. You you make text somewhere in-between you will have people complaining from both ends. So as long as you ensure it can be zoomed it doesn't really matter.
There's something ironic about the fact that I am reading your statement, then.
There will be cases where you want font sizes to be absolute and not vary depending on the system. For instance if it's text that comes with specific graphics of fixed size, or there are strong layout concerns bound to it.
In other cases you'll want relative sizing and adjust to the user's system preferences as much as possible.
That's a decision that has to be made site by site, element by element, which is why em are a recommandation, and couldn't blanket replace absolute units.
The comment text is a nice #000000, but the rest of the text is #828282, which is insufficiently contrasty. Lighthouse flags this, as well as some other accessibility issues.
I notice that on mobile the front page will sometimes have tiny text and if I reload then it will be larger. I'm not sure why the non-deterministic behavior there.
The line length of about 144 is uncomfortably long. It should be about half that. Line height of 1.5 would improve readability as well.
What we often have instead is barely readable light gray text in the name of "clean" design. Well it is not clean, it is moronic. If creators disrespects potential readers that much they might as well present blank screen and be done with it.
Outdoors on a sunny day is no time to read HackerNews! Get offline and enjoy your day.
Fear not downvoters, I speak as a fellow addict.
Not quite sure what the point of some comments being in lower contrast.
But other elements, including submission text like in an Ask HN thread are also too low contrast.