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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.
Let's not forget that the Internet decided a couple of years ago that contrast was a bad thing, and that foreground and background had to be the same color and almost the same shade.
Idiots that value appearance over function have been around for a very long time. People only take them seriously for a little while, although management does take longer.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
What designer originally came up with the idea that light grey, 8 point text in a thin font on bright white background was the height of sophistication? And how did this idea spread??? It's not just the elderly having problems -- normal-vision people I talk to hate it too. The web is an information medium, not a coffee-table book that no one will actually read the text of.
I know the trend is minimalism now, but even Microsoft rolled back some of the crazier design changes they made. Visual Studio became unusable around the Windows 8 era, and they've only recently added back a "dark background" mode and removed the monochrome icons. Apple shows no sign of doing anything to improve this problem. And a whole fleet of Silicon Valley startups are cargo-culting this whole design philosophy...I just wish someone influential would say something.
...its the insane resolutions that most people dont need.
Do you really need a 2560 x 1600 Pixel screen on your 10 Inch Android or whatever-pad? Im in my 50s, and I dont even need prescription glasses according to my doctor. I see just fine. And the screen Im typing (and gaming) with right now is a 27" 1920 x 1080 pixel screen. When Im 50 cm (about 2 feet) away from it, I cant see a single pixel, but the sharpness of the fonts is just fine. But if you replace that with a UHD (4K) screen at the same size, your fonts will be reduced and youll have a lot more screen real-estate, but it will be finnicky to read and look at (even to my 10-12 year old students at school).
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
And with browsers allowing stylesheet overrides and increasing support for screen readers, why should design be done for the lowest common denominator?
Simply zooming in will make low-contrast text easier to read.
"Where text used to be bold and dark, which contrasted well with predominantly white backgrounds" Huh. I remember brightly colored text, black backgrounds and rotating GIFs.
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...
It's somewhat good design. For bright screens, black on white can be harsh-looking. Part of the blame lies on people never tweaking blown out default settings on their screens - especially at larger screen sizes.
That doesn't mean body text should all be lightened (which I know some sites also do), but headline text and graphic overlay text should at least deserve special treatment.
I also wonder if ClearType isn't partly to blame. You get finer edges, but the color fringing kind of hurts the eyes at times.
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.
My plea to designers and software engineers: Ignore the fads...
Web designers? Ignore a fad?
Hahahahahahahahahaha!
Often it breaks stuff. Ad panels overlap and cover things up, text doesn't wrap properly or at all, etc.
Sites don't want to make it easy to extract just the text, because that makes ad-blocking easier. They thus force you to read it their way under their conditions.
Table-ized A.I.
Indeed why do people think they invented serif fonts in the first place? I can no longer read my iphone without reading glasses and all they did was change the damn font thickness not it's size. This isn't a new discovery.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Maybe you should consider the lameness of your joke - filter working as intended.
Internet becoming unreadable because of lighter, more transparent content.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Probably a bit like the site you're looking at right now.
No sig today...
I've noticed that after getting a 4K screen, I've felt much less need to zoom in to view text.
On some level I think this is consequence of web designers targeting mobile first a lot of the time. You tend to have much larger DPI on mobile now, and so you can make lines thinner and trade some color contrast because you have much sharper detail.
"ctrl +" will fix websites by making the text bigger in most or all browsers. Just fyi in case someone didn't know that.
Wasn't CSS supposed to let users pick different profiles or override a webpage's settings? Or has CSS just become purely decorative?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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).
What annoys me the most is the effect of all those scripts on web pages. It's not possible to start reading many web pages for several seconds after it is initially rendered: I need to scroll down to read the text past the lead paragraph, but the scripts keep causing the page to be re-rendered and hence jump back up to the top again. Ugh!
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
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.
Or use the "Read Easily" addon for Firefox - flip the bird at all those "designers".
Why is that better? That removes all styles, which replaces one problem with another.
The entire problem is stupid. Moronic designers who think trendy styles are better than true readability. I've used the Contact Us feature of many websites to complain about that trend. None have responded, and none have changed their sites.
I guess I'll keep reading the comments, hoping to find a real solution.
I wouldn't say the content is getting more transparent. I would on the contrary that there is more and more trolling, unsubstantiated claims, and unverified / unverifiable information, because some people / nations have no interest of having a free internet and see it as a way to control populations.
Damn, I used to love the internet!
Don't want to sound like an old fart, but I'm going to... the first web pages looked fairly similar to a printed page because the printed page is pretty much the ideal way to read. Jesus, some of us have grandparents who died in the war over Serif/Sans-Serif fonts.
Here's how you do it:
I bought an Apple TimeCapsule and I couldn't read the instruction manual. I'm over 40 and usually don't have any problem with print, but the small light gray font they used beat me. I managed to work out how to use it from the web, but it pissed me off.
put your glasses on.
Ignorant comment.
A failing with older people's sight (and some younger ones) is reducing contrast due to increasing clouding of the eye's lenses and/or aqueous humour. Glasses cannot correct for that.
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.