I love the “nothing in nature is true black so don’t use #000000” argument.
Correct, nothing is, and your #000000 won’t be either once it’s shown on a physical screen.
Another extension that nukes grey text is BeeLine Reader. But instead of replacing grey text with black, it uses user-configurable color gradients, which wrap between lines and improve visual tracking. Disclosure: I'm the creator.
1: http://www.beelinereader.com
2: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader/ifj...
3: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/beelinereader...
I'm all for promoting accessibility solutions to that thin gray font mid-10's design menace that is still plaguing web "design".
Can we also make an extension for simulating bad eyesight that everyone who makes websites with thin gray text would be forced to install?
I'm so glad to see this. I don't feel alone anymore. This is one of my biggest headache-producing tasks, reading poor contrast websites.
On the flip side, it is a great job candidate filter for design positions to show them a website and see if it's among the improvements they recommend.
Anybody has some extension to change colors when background is black and text is white? I don't know if this is common or not, but I just cannot look at that for more than a few seconds, my eyes burn. I never found an extension for Chrome that fixed this.
Hacker news is one of the worst readible websites on the planet (especially non-link posts) and somehow this is the place where everyone likes to complain about other websites readability.
Let's start with this website? E.g. "Ask HN" font shade is unreadable.
I use Darken Text for Chrome for the very same task, a must-have extension.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/darken-text/kmonkh...
Sometimes this works for me. Highlight the text with your mouse, or whatever works on mobile devices. Then the highlight colors are sometimes easier to read.
On this site I get white text on medium brown, not as good as the standard colors for me at least.
It's great and should be a built-in option - I prefer to minimize the number of plugins but this one is basic usability that will improve the readability of hundreds of thousands of websites.
For comparison:
- The Tailwind CSS framework’s popular “Prose” plugin defaults text colors to #374151.
- Years ago, designers told me that, for text on a white background, they recommended nothing darker than #333.
Great concept! This should be a standard browser option that has been there for as long as the default font setting overrides.
Oh so that's why monitor makers are fighting the contrast wars...: websites using poor contrast text
HN could use something like this.
Some times less is more, when it comes to things like contrast.
I recommend people with similar interests take a look at uBlock's filter language (yes, the ad blocker). It's a short and shallow learning curve until you can inject your personal CSS into webpages, and incrementally tweak them.
Two small examples:
"Show all text on the internet as black"
"Show comment text on HN as bold"