Contrast Rebellion
contrastrebellion.com
contrastrebellion.com
He's an brilliant idea: quit trying to turn the web from scrolling text into a damn slideshow. Thanks.
They end up standing out to me, and I always end up reading them.
Turns out most people just don't care about typography.
Also - surely this is something that should be fixable in the OS or browser? OSX has an high-contrast accessibility mode. Do we really need to fix this at source?
Section 12 talks about how to detect the high contrast mode used by the OS.
One problem is that low-contrast does not just affect those with a visual impairment. It affects people with a different OS (the gamma on mac and windows is different), on differnet monitors, in different lighting, and with different but not impaired eyes. Most people won't be using high contrast mode because it sucks, and because bad web designers refuse to use high contrast fonts - why are they going to bother detecting high contrast mode?
It's called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. You can refer to the Himba color experiment for more information : http://www.vidipedia.org/vidipedia-the-video-encyclopedia/vi...
Here's a reference that might be what's ringing inside my head: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11759-russian-speakers...
Particularly relevant quote: "This is the first time that evidence has been offered to show cross-linguistic differences in colour perception in an objective task"
Here's more: https://eagereyes.org/blog/2011/you-only-see-colors-you-can-...
What I'm trying to say, there's no that big difference between these two words in Russian to explain the experiment results, unlike what was shown to us on that video about some African tribe. More like "purple" and "violet" — there clearly is a difference, but many people would fail even to point which one is which, and some might even argue about that.
Check out the fourth panel of the article. It doesn't take much to turn 'borderline' into 'awful'.
Yes. Otherwise you are chosing to exclude people.
It's likely people arenot "chosing to exclude", but rather happens to as a byproduct. It's far more likely someone chose low-contrast because they wished to help visitors eyes or for aesthetic purposes, not because they woke up that morning and said "Gosh I hate the sight-impaired".
Being able to read a webpage is not a universal right. It is not the onus of the webpage to make itself readable. You don't demand that japanese webpages offer klingon translations when they only wish to reach a japanese audience simply because they're excluding those poor soles who prefer to read klingon, do you?
It's perfectly reasonable to expect a user of the webpage to make it usable for themselves, whether that be by running it through google translate or turning on their OS's high contrast mode or whatever.
The fact that the choice excludes people should not be bandied as if it's a real argument.
No, it isn't. By deliberately choosing terrible contrast a designer is choosing to exclude people with visual impairment. That's why accessible websites is written into law and contrast is written into best practice guidance for making a website accessible.
> Being able to read a webpage is not a universal right. It is not the onus of the webpage to make itself readable.
There's quite a few situations where accessible websites are a human right. (Eg government websites would be covered by article 21).
When you say "of course you can't read this website; you have a visual impairment" you are passing the blame. But the job of a website team - the thing they are paid for - is to provide information that's accessible to the target audience. It's not my job to read that information. I'm probably not getting paid to read the website.
And bad contrast choices aren't just hard to read for people with visual impairment. They're hard to read for someone on a different monitor or in different lighting.
> You don't demand that japanese webpages offer klingon translations when they only wish to reach a japanese audience simply because they're excluding those poor soles who prefer to read klingon, do you?
You started by saying this was not about choosing to exclude people but here you clearly show that someone has made the choice to exclude a group. The difference being that it is fine to exclude speakers of a made up language; it's not acceptable to exclude disabled people.
Braille users are able to read text using a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refreshable_braille_display but that's not the same thing as a monitor.
Using grey text on grey backgrounds is much more similar to publishing all your text in images which makes is inaccessible to the blind person unless they install OCR software. But hey that's cool it's on them anyway right?
Your eyes and monitor may benefit from lowering the contrast/brightness. Most monitors seem to come set by default to maximum or near-maximum eye-watering brightness and contrast, which is great for in-store displays in an environment containing lots of other high-brightness lighting, but horrible for actual use. Turn it down so that black on white is comfortable to view.
It's far more likely someone chose low-contrast because they wished to help visitors eyes or for aesthetic purposes
It makes me wonder if those who use low-contrast designs are the same ones who have their monitors at such extreme settings that they have to compensate by reducing it on their pages, thus making it unreadable to those with their monitors set to comfortably reproduce black on white.
So you oppose consciousness-raising of an issue, to make people aware of it? You oppose "Hey designers, here are some issues to think of"?
It's perfectly reasonable to expect a user of the webpage to make it usable for themselves
The solutions you offer are sledgehammers. Better to just be a good designer who is inclusive, than demand users monochrome their entire operating system just to read your site. I mean, that's even worse than "This page is best viewed in Browser X".
The biggest problem is the screen on say a MBP is different than an X240 or an XPS13. Next time you are in a big box retailer look at them side-by-side - each screen can access a quite dramatically different contrast and color space.
So the low-contrast issue is a manifestation of the classic "works for me" bug. A "cozy" distance on one display become irritatingly illegible on another.
The WCAG2 (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/) calls for a 4.5:1 ratio ... make this 7:1 or so and you are good.
Black text is the default, and changing it to grey only makes things worse. This is superior web design to the vast majority of sites out there: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
But note that excessive contrast can harm legibility of light text on dark background (although that color scheme is less legible, so it should be reserved for cases where it has real benefits, eg. photo editing software, where it makes it easier to see shadow detail).
Rather than lighten the text, darken the background lightly. #fffff8 is a good start.
The real problem with glare is excessively shiny, glossy screens.
Why should bad designers get to force a bunch of people to fix mistaken web design choices?
"41% of 18-29 year olds polled said they use adblock ... In some countries nearly one quarter of the online population has it installed"
That is a small number of people of the total Internet population.
It's a bit surprising that you think an advertiser pushing ads is a suitable source for information about ad-blocking. Obviously they're going to say that ad-blocking is prevalant and that you need to run better ads to stop people running ad-blockers and oh, we just happen to be an ad company that runs that particular type of ad.
There's apparently 2.9bn internet users, so you're right that ~5% isn't a very big number in context.
I've thought of writing a proxy server that parses pages before serving them to you. It's goal would be to make webpages more readable, with sane font sizes and colors. I'm tired of reading webpages on my iPhone that are "optimized" for mobile where each line is 5 words. I could fit more text on the screen of my first laptop, which had half the resolution. Also, blog posts from medium.com currently crash mobile Safari.
Every website would require custom code. It's default failure mode would be to just show the original web page. I don't want to have to fuck with it when some page gets mangled and is completely unreadable.
I encourage you to check them out - maybe you can do even better.
Or Instapaper et al.
Why ? Because rebellions like revolutions need a critic mass of people and well, we are getting very old here ;-)
Scrolling trough this page made my eyes hurt, did nobody test the transitions when they set really dark and light backgrounds right after each other?
Only in the era of the web has deliberate illegibility somehow become trendy.
Anything else: rebel all you want, nobody fucking cares.
My personal humble opinion, btw: the "unreadable" examples are much more readable and easier on the eyes, than eye-burning "readable" ones. So I could as well go around rebelling about white on black or black on white, but I won't, because it's stupid, I follow my own advices and use Pocketbook for long reads anyway.
This attitude is hostile to a wide range of people who already have to fight the computer to get things done and shouldn't have to fight the stupid decisions made by bad designers.
> nobody fucking cares.
For various values of "nobody" including "some people", where some people means any group subject to various disability discrimination laws in whatever countries they operate in.
Hence my first point about "if it hurts conversion/…". In other words, if it's your business — it's your business. If it's not — well, you are free to complain about other people coloring their stuff as they like all you want, but I hope they won't be upset about that, because they really shouldn't be, and believing that your point of view is the only right one (even if it's supported by some Nielsen or whatever) is simply ignorance.
Your monitor brightness maybe set too high For example, mobile devices' minimum brightness is far too bright in a dark room.
There is no reason to use light grey text on a mid grey background for text that you want people to read.