Slashdot Mirror
Internet is Becoming Unreadable Because of a Trend Towards Lighter, Thinner Fonts (telegraph.co.uk)
An anonymous reader writes: The internet is becoming unreadable because of a trend towards lighter and thinner fonts, making it difficult for the elderly or visually-impaired to see words clearly, a web expert has found. Where text used to be bold and dark, which contrasted well with predominantly white backgrounds, now many websites are switching to light greys or blues for their type. Award winning blogger Kevin Marks, founder of Microformats and former vice president of web services at BT, decided to look into the trend after becoming concerned that his eyesight was failing because he was increasingly struggling to read on screen text. He found a 'widespread movement' to reduce the contrast between the words and the background, with tech giants Apple, Google and Twitter all altering their typography. True black on white text has a contrast ratio of 21:1 -- the maximum which can be achieved. Most technology companies agree that it is good practice for type to be a minimum of 7:1 so that the visually-impaired can still see text. But Mr Marks, found that even Apple's own typography guidelines, which recommended 7:1 are written in a contrast ratio of 5.5:1.
All major text editors have also moved to light grey on darker grey text.
And lets not go into websites with white-on black for extra afterimage after you try to read them (eg. hackaday).
No sig today...
Windows users always think higher resolution means smaller fonts. Proper operating systems automatically render the fonts based on the monitor's DPI.
Or use the "Read Easily" addon for Firefox - flip the bird at all those "designers".
The "designers" won't be happy until the page appears to contain no information at all - 100% clean and clear.
No sig today...
"ctrl +" will fix websites by making the text bigger in most or all browsers. Just fyi in case someone didn't know that.
But the people who became web designers were formerly page layout designers. They revolted. They were used to printed paper, where they controlled everything the reader saw - fonts, font sizes, text wrap around photos, columns, etc. Their ego couldn't stand ceding some of that control to the reader, so they fought tooth and nail to bring that control back to themselves.
In the early days this wasn't true. Good print designers know how to choose fonts and whitespace that will scale properly and keep a nice layout as you scale font size up and down. It was the managers and PMs, insisting that the web page look exactly like they wanted, on every monitor, like it was a magazine page. "The name of the company can't be smaller than 2 inches, the branding spec says so!" "On what size monitor?" "Don't bother me with your geeky trivialities!".
The "designers" willing to put up with that shit gradually drove out the old heads who knew what actually looked good. Now fashion has replaced 3 centuries of science about legibility.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Jesus H. That's like the anorexic fashion show of editors. There's nothing of substance there.
VIM: Whatever my terminal is, which is white on black.
Emacs: Whatever my terminal is, which is white on black.
Notepad++: Black on white.
BBedit: Black on white.
That covers all of them I think, over Linux, Windows and MacOs. Nothing else matters.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
It broke for people who decided it was more important to satisfy their vision of the presentation than it was to deliver any useful content, and therefore threw in tons of hacks and complexity and stretched the model beyond all sanity. And let's be clear that that "vision of the presentation" had nothing to do with making anything any easier to use, conveying information more effectively, or anything like that. It was and is all about masturbating with design.
It worked fine for people who actually had something to communicate and cared about that communication. Unfortunately those people seem to be a minority.