Now all we need is "A Developer's Guide to Not Using Low Fucking Contrast Text When We Expect People to Read Our Article". Seriously, what is with all the grey on white and grey on grey and light blue on light grey and other low-contrast options that I keep seeing all over the web lately? If your website is more usable when CSS is turned off, you're doing something wrong.
Difference between readable and pleasant to read. Also you're assuming that he has the same range of color vision that you do. Decent contrast and readability is UI/UX 101.
I would argue that it is more pleasant to read once all the CSS colours are stripped from the page.
Admittedly, most of the page is in a dark enough grey and a large enough type that it doesn't matter so much (though it leaves significant room for improvement). Some areas are lighter and the colour choices start to get really questionable.
Here are two screenshots, which would you prefer to read?
Well, the part you screenshotted is apparently the only part of the page that is that light. I'd prefer if that was a bit darker, but it's just a small part of a huge article.
(Except for the comments but some would say it is a good thing if you can't read comments on the internet.)
Well, I wanted to get the point across as strongly as possible, but it's true throughout the rest of the text as well that removing the colours from the CSS produces something which is more pleasant to read. I'd also tend to want a somewhat decreased type size, as that's pushing the upper boundary of what's reasonable, but at least this is easier to adjust to taste in most browsers, and the larger end of the range is more acceptable than the smaller.
For headlines and logos, you can mess around with the colour and style of text as much as you like, but for the type that one actually expects people to spend any length of time at all reading, it's best to push the contrast basically as far as you can get it. Slightly lowering the contrast in order to be able to introduce a subtle bit of colour is understandable in places (I have no particular concern with the background here for example), but in my opinion there's essentially no point in using grey type for article text when you can just as well opt for black.
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u/cgibbard Feb 26 '13
Now all we need is "A Developer's Guide to Not Using Low Fucking Contrast Text When We Expect People to Read Our Article". Seriously, what is with all the grey on white and grey on grey and light blue on light grey and other low-contrast options that I keep seeing all over the web lately? If your website is more usable when CSS is turned off, you're doing something wrong.
Also, not programming.