Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomxor | Hacker News Reader

Your comment is ironically exclusionary, the whole point of high contrast text is to ease reading for the visually impaired minority.

View on HN

Indeed, it reads like this, but the visually impaired minority is actually mostly part of the majority of people without calibrated screens I was mentioning. So I actually included them.

I'm sure people with calibrated screens can find a setting where black on white is comfortable, even temporarily, while most people just can't fix contrast lowered at the source. Including not visually impaired people in not ideal environments.

But that’s the wrong approach. You can always tonemap low-contrast values into a higher-contrast color range, but not the opposite way. Once you have something at #000000, it’s clipped, there’s no way for any distinction between these values, same at #ffffff.

I dont buy this argument. Show it in video how would you achieve that tonemap. On Xorg, no fancy tooling.

That’s the real issue, isn’t it? The tooling for this is shitty. You can create an accurate color profile for your monitor, apply it in software and your OS will automatically map the values correctly. This will improve contrast quite a bit, but is complicated, expensive, and you’ll lose a lot of definition in other brightness ranges.

But the same issues apply in reverse if you try to reduce contrast because some idiot thought a 200:1 contrast for text was healthy.

My personal solution is relatively simple: I replace every monitor that’s too shitty to do sRGB at good contrast at 400 nits. For a T470/T480 I can recommend this panel: https://www.xelent-store.de/Innolux-N140HCG-GQ2-400cd-Low-Po...

And for those on a phone outdoors!

My phone modifies display gamma in direct sunlight to compensate for that. It's your phone that should improve it's tooling to handle environment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com