Eric Shepherd (Sheppy) composed on 2017-07-07 12:14 (UTC-0400):
> I agree entirely about the prevalance of gray text on the web today.
> Designers assure us that the reduced contrast is easier on the eyes and
> therefore easier to read, but I think that’s untrue
It's absolutely untrue, and proffered from a biased perspective[1], eagle-eyed
youthful designers who think it's exclusively their domain to determine
what's best for users of the sites they style. On the contrary, it is expected
that personal computing devices become personalized to the tastes, needs and
whims of their users. Too much of either contrast and/or brightness is most
often hardware configuration fault. Too little of either could be configuration
fault, but nearly always is designer fault.
WRT contrast, *if* the contrast is in fact too high, it's almost certainly
because contrast and brightness of the display is inappropriately configured.
Those with too much brightness and/or contrast, unless artificially
constrained, can *always* reduce them to appropriate levels. Such is not the case
in the reverse. It's impossible for those in need to increase them beyond 100%,
which is probably where they are set on displays used by designers that think
reduction is called for in their styles.
Hoards of displays have been shipped with inappropriately configured brightness
and contrast, in order that they stand out in brightly lit stores alongside
other displays or brightly lit office spaces; often as high as 100%, which makes
reduction the only personalization option available.
WCAG on the subject is absolutely nuts, from a just-good-enough-to-get-by mindset
rather than be-the-best-you-can-be. There's no addressing the compounding effect
when the text size it's coupled with is sub-default, saying only that less contrast
will "pass" with text that is larger.
More about gray:
https://backchannel.com/how-the-web-became-unreadable-a781ddc711b6
https://jebswebs.net/blog/2013/07/whats-with-all-the-gray/
http://contrastrebellion.com/
https://www.sitepoint.com/community/t/why-are-so-many-sites-using-gray-text/4667
> We’re looking to strike a
> happy medium by using a very deep gray rather than black, but not the
> lighter gray most sites seem to use nowadays.
That may indeed be the case with some of the more recent revisions, but there's
still too much gray, not so much because it is gray, but because gray is usually
coupled with sub-default type size, compounding the detrimental impact of both.
Especially disturbing is gray has escaped into the Firefox UI, usurping the UI
(black) font color configured for the rest of the DE:
http://fm.no-ip.com/SS/Moz/ff55-fontprefs.jpg
[1]cf.
a:
https://mises.org/library/everything-popular-wrong-malinvestment-and-consumers
b:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20161026-how-liars-create-the-illusion-of-truth