Hacker News Reader

Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

In other news, grey text on a light grey background is terrible to read (especially with such a light font weight).

If you are on desktop, there are two CSS color rules to disable in order to get the color reasonable. Just click on the paragraph in inspector and they should be easy to find. The site should just work out of the box though, just wanted to provide a workaround for people who aren't red-tailed hawks.

Also wanted to add that for sites you go on a lot, Amino seems to be a pretty good browser extension for saving modifications persistently.

Reader Mode is Firefox and Safari remove most of unnecessary styling and other non-essential elements. Highly recommended with text pieces.

Not just the colors. The site's presentation with complex UI elements is confusing at best. I wish it was laid out like https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ Much clearer.

Yes. I wasn’t able to read the content on mobile at all and I have okay eyesight.

I also didn't realize the carousel of screenshots has a caption specifying the site name. Which I thought was an odd oversight.

Then I realized the site name is in a thin red font on a dark background.

Reader mode in firefox is what you want here.

The fact that reader modes exist is a story about the sad state of the web. They are a useful hack for users but we should not have to rely on them.

I think it's a testament to firefox wanting to provide a better experience for the web.

is this a criticism of the linked site, or HN?

... and to stay on topic, .org may not be credible, but the indistinguishable-at-a-glace .ong is absolutely vetted. So keep an eye our for that ;)

The linked site, obviously. It handily fails accessibility guidelines, far more-so than HN.

The gray text is intentionally used for this purpose on HN.

This is arguably still an accessibility concern because there's no easy way to make the text readable. Perhaps hovering over it could make it show in black? I've tried highlighting it, but that doesn't work very well because my highlight color is light blue by default (I think I could change it but wouldn't do so just for this purpose).

I'm on Firefox and it has a pretty deep blue for highlight color. Maybe it's an accessibility concern of the browser as opposed to HN? I don't think making the text lighter interferes with screen readers for example.

Yes, but people who have normal-ish vision don't have or know how to use dedicated screen readers. I could figure out how to have my browser or OS read aloud, but I generally don't want to have things read out loud to me. I just want to be able to read them visually.

I think my highlight color is set at the OS level, at least on my Mac.

If you click on the timestamp (i.e. "2 hours ago") you will get a fully readable comment.

That only works if you're logged into Hacker News.

Wow, have been on this site for nearly a decade and I just learned two things! I wonder why there is different greying behavior for people who are logged in?

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