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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.
UHD doesn't require you to fit more on your screen. You can also keep everything the same size at a much higher DPI, for better sharpness and clarity (edge contrast is contrast too). Or find somewhere nice in the middle. For those with high visual acuity, it's nice not having blurry edges.
Part of the problem is that modern UI designers chase fads. (The previous fad was antiskeuomorphism.)
You can see this in the UI "devolution" of Photoshop and others tools:
* The background used to be black on white, aka "light" themes.
* Now "dark" themes are in vogue -- with white on black.
Also, True Type / Postscript / Web fonts still don't support color gradients. The classic is the old vertical "Orange-Yellow-White" gradient font used in Raiders of the Lost Ark
Yet back in 1992 this was trivial with bitmap fonts:
* Ultima 7 Main Menu
* Ultima 7 NPC Dialog
Most UI designers are clueless about the difference print fonts (serif) and screen fonts (sans serif). I don't expect many of them to understand the pixel grid
--
DVD / Blu-Ray Region Locking == Price Fixing.
Remember those crazy, utopian, idealists who tried to design web standards so that content and presentation could be, and would be, cleanly separated; and thus easily adapted to the requirements of just about any user agent out there?
That dream isn't completely dead; but it sure doesn't get much respect from the cool kids(which can make the 'just impose your own CSS' trick pretty hairy on some of the touchier sites out there).
At age 64, this article is timely for me. There are sites I would really like to read (example theintercept.com) but can not because they have fallen into the thrall of toney grey fonts as have so many others. In my example, I hardly think the people are bad people, but aren't they interested in getting their message out?
So I looked around on that site for a link like "Feedback" or "Contact Us", but without any luck. Perhaps it was in the same grey font.
Anyhow, I did find a "Jobs" link so I applied for a position of my own invention called "Web Usability Analyst, Part Time" and I explained my great interest in the position.
Haven't heard back.
The linked article itself is not even using black fonts.
They are using #333333 which is a dark grey.
Sure, for an extremely exaggerated definition of "grey" - Just checked SublimeText's default theme: the text color is #F8F8F2, so just a hint of a shade off of absolute pure white leaning to yellow. The background, however, is indeed a "dark grey", but very well contrasted, as it is #272822. The default font is also a nice bold font which is easy to read. The other text editors on your list also follow a very similar style to this too.
Sad but true.
Having all information lately pushed in the form of images and videos doesn't help - I still haven't found a reliable means of searching for that one video where someone said ...
I remember the internet back in the late 90s, when everyone had their own little corner of the net to publish the things they wanted to share with the world, and it was all in text. There was a lot of crap, sure, but you could find the stuff you wanted to. Now I get the feeling that looking up news from just last month is an exercise in futility as it gets buried in pointless results; that is, if there even is something to search for and it wasn't just a picture meme that will be forever lost.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Nope. Even when I get a headache and associated monocular diplopia, I still prefer my terminals (all light-on-dark) to websites (these days, practically all dark on light). I get the diplopia on light backgrounds as well, and the overall brightness makes my headache worse.
Someone had to do it.
> Web "designers" are probably adjusting their monitor's contrast settings to make them usable.
Close, but that's not it!
As a guy who owns a laptop with a somewhat-worse-than-typical screen as well as a high-color-and-contrast-accuracy IPS monitor, I know what's going on:
Web designers often have nice monitors because they're concerned about color accuracy. Nice monitors also have good contrast.
Remember a while back when folks were going apeshit about how the border around Google's "Sponsored Results" was invisible, and they would post screenshots that "proved" this? I would look at those screenshots on my laptop and say "Yep, that border is invisible". I would look at those same screenshots on my nice monitor and say "Nope, that border is clearly visible.".
Noone is adjusting anything to make those web dev text editors usable. The designers just have decent monitors. If the market worked correctly, _everyone's_ monitor would have perceptually perfect color accuracy, 10bpp+ color range, and good contrast. Sadly, the market does not.