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.
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.
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...
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.
My plea to designers and software engineers: Ignore the fads...
Web designers? Ignore a fad?
Hahahahahahahahahaha!
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...
"ctrl +" will fix websites by making the text bigger in most or all browsers. Just fyi in case someone didn't know that.
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.
A lot of sites break if you try to zoom in or change the default fonts. Word wraps don't align properly. Letters start to overlap pictures or sidebar menus.
The entire concept of the WWW as Berners-Lee conceived it was that the website would transmit information to the client, and the client's browser would display it in a format most suitable for the client display device. That way the exact same web page would work on a tiny cell phone screen or gargantuan 50" 4k TV used as a screen. Neither of those existed at the time, but he had enough foresight to predict a wide variation in client display sizes and requirements.
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. The early flash-only websites were their first salvo. Everyone hated flash sites, but they loved them because it would display exactly and only as they designed it. If the 1024 pixel width they chose didn't fit in someone's 800x600 monitor? Well obviously it was the reader's fault and they needed to upgrade to a better GPU and monitor. Modern websites are so design-centered that they actually have to create two different sites for display on large computer monitors vs small phone and tablet screens. There's almost nothing left under the client's control that can be modified without breaking something about the site.
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.