Hacker News Reader

Comment by Julesman | Hacker News Reader

I know I will get downvoted for this as off topic, but this is just the latest blog we've seen in this top 30 of many that show ZERO regard for legibility. Yes, I can zoom my browser, but c'mon.

A 13px font for paragraph text is nearly hostile. It's not that legible to people with perfect eyesight, but then it's not at all legible to anyone with imperfect eyesight. It's like saying you don't care if anyone who reads your blog would struggle doing that. And given how very simple it is to change, it's kind of insulting, specifically given how many years usability has been a thing.

10 years ago I wouldn't have written this comment. But now this isn't how you behave if you have an audience.

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This website doesn't even set a font size. The font size is just your browser's default. You have your font size set too small. This website is one of the few examples of doing it right. How can a web developer know what your requirements are? Only you can know that. There are many bad things about the modern web but fortunately being able to set your own font size is still a thing.

Firefox even lets you set a minimum font size. And there is an option to stop websites overriding your choices which helps with sites like HN (but not the one you are complaining about) which explicitly set a small font size.

It was super readable on mobile - I greatly appreciated its easy to read format. Presumably other platforms yielded a different experience…

Not sure what you are talking about, the font seems much bigger than the one on hacker news and pretty standard sized for a website or a desktop (which usually has default font size at 11 or 12px).

Besides:

- Nearly if not all desktops allow to scale. If your eyeseight is that bad you should set it at desktop level anyway.

- All browsers and terminal emulators allows one to use his own defined fonts and size.

- Nearly if not all browsers and terminal emulators now allows you to zoom dynamically for that odd website and keep that preference.

- Firefox has reader mode, I guess similar extensions exists for most browsers.

> And given how very simple it is to change, it's kind of insulting, s

Changing by which size? 16px, 32px, 64px? There is no single form of universality regarding eyesight. And I would argue that if your eyeseight is bad, the solution are prescription glasses, not websites with huge fonts.

Hacker News is a terribly designed website and just plain unreadable without zoom. 12px might have been the standard 15 years ago, but most sites use larger sizes. Gmail and old Reddit are using 14px. The New York Times and Washington Post are using 20px (and those are usually longer reads). The fact that you can zoom and override fonts does not give people a right to design unreadable/inaccessible websites.

>does not give people a right to design unreadable/inaccessible websites.

They aren't as the rendering of a website is ultimately always controlled by the client/visitor.

Any website whose semantic is only made of text is infinitely more accessible than another that would use bigger fonts but would include images or content that only render if javascript is activated.

And ultimately, they have every right to make it the way they want.

> Washington Post are using 20px (and those are usually longer reads)

In the full text maybe, I find much smaller fonts than those on computer.rip in metadatas and subtitles.

> They aren't as the rendering of a website is ultimately always controlled by the client/visitor.

This true in a technical sense, but not in a practical sense. If you want me to stay on your website, you'd better put in the effort to make it usable and readable. It's not the user's job to design the website, it's the job of the damn website designer!

Some users don't know how to use their browser's zoom feature. Most don't know how to change the default font in their browser, and those that do might not want to do this in case some sites break because of bad assumptions. Others don't like zoom, because it makes images look blurry. The default appearance of the page should be usable and accessible by an average user.

And yes, the 20px font applies to the full text. I'm not arguing that smaller fonts should be banned, things like metadata don't need to be as large. But the main content of the page should be larger and comfortably readable.

The average user use prescription glasses if he has eyesights issues.

I've been wearing glasses since I was 6 or 7y old.

I’m wearing glasses too, and they are of the correct power for my needs (as measured by an optometrist). That does not make HN less unusable and the posted page less uncomfortable at 100% zoom from the recommended viewing distance.

This is why you should do more CSS with rems and respecting the user agent's size so it's easier for folks to get the size they want (this article's author used ems and defaults though)

At least on my Android in Chrome, it seems to have the same font size as hacker news. Requesting "Desktop Site" yields the same results.

And yes, I do believe that Hacker News needs a bigger default font.

(I'm getting old. You will too!)

My default zoom on HNews is 133%. I too am getting old (or my eyes are at least), and agree with you old sods :))

More annoying to me than the font size is the font selection. Maybe it's because I didn't grow up using monochrome terminals, but for me monospace fonts are generally terrible for legibility (except in places like coding where lining things up vertically is useful). Typographically, the font designers have to make all sorts of readability sacrifices to make all characters the same width.

I agree, at least with Firefox we can put in read mode, in this case it was much better.

FWIW I downvoted you for predicting that your comment would be downvoted.

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