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me_bx

These guys should make their site's even text smaller, thinner, and lighter in color.

For the moment, we still notice that there's something that we're supposed to read.

http://contrastrebellion.com/

Sorry for the rant, that's the final straw...

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On wow, those were words there. I thought it was just an abstract pattern of grey noise.

Pity. I'd really like to know what the person is trying to say.

They are using the same template as this group: http://opengrok.github.io/OpenGrok/ ... I'd really like to meet the person who made this - I bet he can see through walls. (it's here: https://github.com/orderedlist/minimal)

might as well plug my site: http://unreadable.website

The CSS for this site is taken from the Github Pages theme "Minimal:" https://github.com/orderedlist/minimal

I have a 3-year old PR here to fix it. Feel free to +1 :) https://github.com/orderedlist/minimal/pull/2

done :)

Not to mention, on mobile browsers as soon as you zoom in the text, to save the wasted space with the logo on the left, the logo also gets bigger and move to the middle of the screen, covering the text.

I recall one of the full professors back in grad school commenting about how the (print) layouts in Wired magazine were so hard to read, and lamenting about his old eyes. He was immensely gratified to learn that we young grad students couldn't read the small reflective silver block text on neon orange backgrounds either.

But for the NoTCP site, I have a sneaking suspicion that this may have resulted, in-part, from only previewing the site on HiDPI (aka Retina) displays. It's an increasingly easy trap to fall into, especially for "casual" designers. My eyesight kinda sucks, but I've noticed that really good modern HiDPI displays make much lighter fonts comfortable than I'd otherwise be able to use.

I have a better-than-retina 3200x1800 13.3" Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro display and this is hard to read. I see this argument all the time, but I really don't think HiDPI displays are to blame, OS X maybe.

Good point. FWIW, I've had a horrid time getting decent readability with Windows {7 thru 8.1} on a Retina Macbook Pro (via either Boot Camp or Parallels). I've attributed most of that to legacy Windows apps, which seem to be a horror show in HiDPI mode. I eventually just had to set that VM to a much lower resolution to make the main app (CAD suite) usable there. It's almost shocking how much better OS X handled the low to high DPI transition than Windows has been able to manage.

3200x1800 here and it is unreadable as well. Could be that I am using Firefox, but so are... a lot of people.

I'm not one to complain much, but it is unreadable. My tired eyes were not happy with their decision. May I suggest something more readable to the people behind the website? Please and thank you.

Indeed, when you have to highlight text to increase contrast, it's not a good design.

I have found that high contrast is actually bad for my eyes. I regularly spend 8+ hour stretches programming. If my screen is black on white my eyes get tired after about 6 hours. If it's white on black I get similar but less pronounced results. However, if I use a light grey on a dark grey, with moderate contrast, I can work indefinately, or at least my eyes are no longer the limitation.

Rather than have web sites alter their color schemes to suit you, and cause trouble for others in the process, why not turn down the contrast on your screen?

Couldn't you say much the same to the person complaining about the text on this site?

Could you? What fix can I reasonably (which I will arbitrarily define as excluding manual DOM/CSS twiddling) apply to this site to make it more suited to my high contrast desires?

I have Stylish installed on Firefox. Then I click the "Find styles for this site" menu item, download the "Hacker News Solarized (Dark)" theme, and enjoy high contrast YC on all my devices. Takes a few minutes at most, and one Firefox restart if you didn't have Stylish installed already.

I have my monitor calibrated for photo editing. I'm not going to mess with the brighhtness and contrast because some site is using a hard to read colour combination.

If it's a site that's worth reading I'll overide the CSS with Stylish otherwise I'll just not bother reading the site. It's funny how many sites fall into the later category.

Good answer! It didn't occur to me that there might be useful calibrations where, say, pure black on white is hard to read, but you still want pure black and white to be at those levels for other purposes.

alright. I have a few questions:

* What is the lighting condition of your work environment?

* What kind of screen do you use?

* What does your "normal" desktop look like?

* What kind of programming do you do (scientific? web dev?)?

I have assumptions about this and I want to see how they pan out.

Why not use f.lux? At work I turn it up to max at all times of day and it's really much easier on the eyes. I hardly noticed the redness after a day or two.

That's interesting. Haven't seen that before. I've already solved my own problem though.

You can lower contrast somewhat without making text unreadable, this site suggests #333 on #fff. https://ia.net/know-how/100e2r

I think the lowest contrast that is still somewhat acceptable for me is the solarized theme, but even that goes over too close to the low contrast end: http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized

Contrast in solarized is too low for me - it is hard to read text on the website. Dark variant is more readable, though.

Part of the problem is that people see differently.

I agree; I find myself frequently having to disable all CSS to even read a site[0]. If you'd like an easy way to toggle all styling on a page on or off, you can use the Read Easily[1] FireFox extension.

[0] - http://nacr.us/media/pics/screenshots/screenshot--11-33-12.p...

[1] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/read-easily/

> that's the final straw...

so ... you're quitting the internet?

Given the context, it may have been intentional.

indeed :)

Care has even been taken to include the light and bold variants of the font, but not the regular one.

I dont see any problem... :-)

https://imgur.com/zzk4iN0

As someone who has no problem reading this (or many of the things linked to by some of the child comments), can you explain what part of it you struggle with? I'm not on a particularly fancy resolution or anything, just a standard, non-retina Macbook. I'm also only 24, so perhaps my eyes are just "still young.

Times have changed when 14px is "small"!

Font size should be in pt, really. Then it will never get "small".

Don't worry. You've lost nothing.

  ||googleapis.com

for a more beautiful web. Nothing of value is lost.

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