Visual problems besetting Android's Lollipop

The contast point of the article is so true. The light gray text on white background which is so trendy nowadays is terribly uncomfortable, especially outside in brighter light.

I really hate black on white, it has something to do with my eyes and white on black is much more comfortable. Desktop can be set, desktop browsers can be styled using userscripts or addons but mobile hardly.

So I would love to have the option to render light text on dark backgrounds independently of the page CSS on mobile browsers and I don't mean the silly Chrome invert mode that inverts the images as well.

Mobile apps would be better with this especially at night with lights off it is much more comfortable than the white background no matter how much dimming or redshifting you use. Some have dark themes but lot of them don't.

This season, watching family members struggle with new devices, it struck me that even if empowered tech enhancers don't have poor vision (or other suboptimal abilities), they should at least identify with the struggles of their parents and people they know, and this will increasingly be reflected as cohorts grows older. My dad has always been involved in technology and he eagerly explores new features, but he's very often tripped up by poor usability choices. But in general with open competition things have been getting startlingly better each month.

Worth mentioning Lasik doesn't help here, it only helps with far vision, it can actually make near vision worse because it can cause other visual aberrations.

Firefox also used to have text reflow when zooming, but they removed it for some reason[1][2]. This is the sole reason I use Opera on mobile.

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=710298

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1mkqry/firefox_24_...

I wholeheartedly agree with the author here, but I also think Apple is even worse in some regards. Ever since iOS 7 I don't even trust their UI guidelines anymore. Look at this picture of the Music app on my iPhone: http://imgur.com/6ADrt9U

What does the text on the bottom mean? Oh you can't read it? Yeah it's Chinese. These are the "buttons" for Repeat, Shuffle, etc. I have no idea what kind of designer thought it was wise to use text instead of icons there, especially since most icons in a music player are easily recognized most of the time.

It all started with this "trend" to go flat, now I can't even see what are supposed to be buttons and what not.

This Christmas they couldn't get the kids to watch Arthur on pbs because the little ones were running around with Nintendo 2dses and playing with smart phones. I saw my cousin tony who is a PlayStation enthusiast and asked him why he didn't buy a Vita and he said that close focusing wrecks your eyes.

I learned to read at 3 1/2 and by the time I was in school I couldn't see the blackboard. I felt wearing glasses isolated me from people and made it harder to fit into school. At least I got good at reading so I put up good numbers in high school and college and went on to get a PhD.

It is so ironic that mobile technology will make people's vision get worse except then all you know about is Mario and Yoshi.

The contrast problem is indeed true in some screens. I don't know how much of it is due to the .0 version rush.. Many things are still rough around the edges in material and I expect the platform to really start to shine with the .1 version.

The text wrap problem is pretty weak though. As far as I can see, this 'bug' report was well managed. It is not a bug, just somebody disagreeing with a change in the platform. It is well explained in the 4.4 release documentation, along with the reasons behind it. Unless the author explains why the Chrome team is mistaken, this is entirely pointless.

After a brief stint on Windows Phone, I recently switched back to Android and was mildly amused that, thanks to the lack of word wrap, the browsing experience on mobile Chrome was somehow worse than mobile IE.

Similar bad design decisions prevent my father from using Chrome on Linux, at least as of when I set it up a year ago. I couldn't make the text in tabs bigger, something Firefox has no trouble with.

The zoom is why I have always used dolphin on android and probably always will. Can we call these set of bugs Mac Retina Blindness?

My solution for this is to hold my phone in landscape mode.

It's a little unsporting to whack Google over the head with it's own (very recently) released design guidelines[1], but hey, Google is a corporation and so basically has the feelings of a psychopath, and compassion and empathy is wasted on it, right? :)

Of course the OP is correct when he says those contrast ratios (nice tool[2] for calculating that, BTW) are way too low.

[1] http://www.google.com/design/spec/material-design/introducti...

[2] http://leaverou.github.io/contrast-ratio/#%23389088-on-%2300...