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Comment by mkidd | Hacker News Reader

This is a huge pet peeve for me. Shouldn't this be a “solved” style problem in 2023! I'd gladly fire every tenth web designer responsible for this problem regardless of their other merits.

Small fonts are one thing. There are browser hot keys to change the font size. And I'm a huge fan of the "Zoom Text Only" option in Firefox where the rest of page doesn't go flying off the edge of my viewing area. But low contrast text is hugely annoying. What are my options? Open the developer tools and tweak the CSS every time? Try to find a good browser extension that solves the problem? Write my own? And some of these solutions are inconvenient or impossible on mobile.

I understand using low contrast text (and small fonts) for tedious but necessary legal disclaimers. But if you use it elsewhere, I'll move on—either you have nothing to say and don't really want people to read the text, have a poor designer, or are generally incompetent.

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> Shouldn't this be a “solved” style problem in 2023!

Grey-on-grey text is idiotic. It's everywhere. So is scroll-jacking; so is weird animations on text articles (The Guardian does this from time to time). So is web-pages that come up as a sheet of whiteness, if you don't want to run javascript indiscriminately (REACT, I think). So is megabytes of script, just to display a page of text.

This kind of stuff is weenie web-developers, showing off. I used to do that - in 2001. It's fun. But I wasn't designing high-profile websites with important text content.

> What are my options? Open the developer tools and tweak the CSS every time? Try to find a good browser extension that solves the problem? Write my own? And some of these solutions are inconvenient or impossible on mobile.

I wrote a bookmarklet a few years ago that doesn't always work, but does work most of the time.

  javascript:(function() {
      document.querySelectorAll('p, li, div').forEach(function(n) {
          n.style.color = '#000';
          n.style.font = '500 16px/1.7em sans-serif';
      });
  })();

I find this a good compromise between "the original design" and "reader mode", which I find often changing too much.

Biggest downside is that it doesn't work well for "dark mode" websites, where low-contrast seems the most prevalent, but I find "dark mode" very hard to read even with good contrast so I typically tend to just not read those sites unless I really need to.

Angry old man take: people that do HTML are young people that don't mind doing fairly complex technical work for peanuts, because they can get visual satisfaction more quickly.

"Design" is something that is after a one or two trick pony. It is intended to disrupt known patterns (often loaded with decades of collected wisdom, sometimes legitimately backward).

Since the UI footsoldiers are all underpaid interns being churned on a yearly basis, collected wisdom won't be transferred unless it was provided in education.

It's not just HTML. There's a reason the same IT mistakes occur over and over and over. IT ages out all the people that achieve "wisdom". They either move above the point where "progress and wise refinement" would occur into the world of enterprise visio diagram engineering, or out of the industry period.

Now get off my lawn.

Dark Reader extension tries to solve this problem. It's primary use case is adding dark mode support, but it can help with contrast too.

>What are my options?

Set your browser to open every website in reader mode by default. It takes one week to get used to and then you will never want to go back. You can without hassle add exceptions for those websites that are not good in reader mode. This solution works great on desktop and mobile.

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