Hacker News Reader

Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

I always wondered about this one, you hear it a lot: "A little less contrast

Black on white? How often do you see that kind of contrast in real life? Tone it down a bit, asshole. I would've even made this site's background a nice #EEEEEE if I wasn't so focused on keeping declarations to a lean 7 fucking lines."

But my monitor is not perfect, nobodies is so why make stuff less well readable, I don't understand it. It annoys me to no end when I have to copy paste stuff into a text editor just to get a white background because someone decide a background should never be white and people seem to agree. If I want less contrast I'll tone down the background lighting of my screen.

View on HN

There are lots of people who are annoyed to no end that the background of most websites is white and their browser does not offer simple way to change that. Plugins like stylish help to both groups. Just set the background color to what you want in custom css style, cope with the broken graphics and enjoy the web.

So, when your background is too bright... why not reduce monitor brightness? The letters will stay as black as they are (hey its 2016), your background gets less bright. This has other advantages too. Why must a website creator choose how much (maximum) light my screen emits around the letters?

I do reduce often, but this makes everything else on my desktop too dark so I can't read it. So I have a keyboard shortcuts that run xrandr --brightness <intensity> that I use frequently, but it is not the ideal solution for everyone. Better solution of this problem would be if websites detected brightness+contrast preference set up in browsers, like they detect language or browser window size, and changed their CSS accordingly. It would be great accessibility and UX improvement of the Web. We should make some standard for that and push it up into browser projects. Anybody experienced with such a task?

Just because I want a less bright background for reading text doesn't mean I want my monitor to be incapable of displaying a bright white - it's not only used for reading text.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com