Gray text: please stop | Hacker News Reader

Gray text: please stop

contraterrene.com

I'd like to see a study on this issue rather than an uninformative rant. I recently made my homepage text dark grey on just off-white. It's hard to tell quickly what I really prefer though. Conscious preference doesn't necessarily correspond to readability (measured by speed, comprehension, eye strain, ...).

Reading from a monitor isn't the same as reading from paper. There was a comment on a story recently from someone who'd worked with television saying they never use pure black or white.

I notice that, for example, the BBC news uses a very dark gray for the body text of its website's articles. Do they really not know what they are doing? Also Google uses large blocks of grey text in blogs, help documents, etc. Aren't they notorious for testing everything?

Dark gray text on a not-quite-white background - FTW.

The rant is against light-gray, not dark-gray. Its about the contrast and the article has a valid point - definitely worth a rant.

Irritatingly, now no longer responding.

Cache here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vMqU7OC...

Thanks! I was just going to do that.

Gray text is great for text that needs to be readable but not as 'priority' or demarked away from the body text, but I agree it's horrible when you see an all Gray block. My eyes do not love having to try and focus on gray contrast levels for much longer than a few seconds.

Seems to me that a post like this should be written in black text. Instead, it's written in ... gray text.

No, it's in black text (or would be, if the server hadn't fallen over -- I really need to go with a static blogging system).

The claim about high contrast is definitely valid, but explicitly stating that it should be black, when the stylesheet says #373737 - seems a bit questionable.

I would much prefer to look at font in a very dark grey on a pale color, than the stark look of black on white.

Still, the high contrast argument it is totally valid, and it's very annoying when you see pages that require text highlighting to be read without strain.

Okay, "dark enough that I never even noticed that it wasn't #000". Happy now?

I think you were just looking for a nit to pick, frankly.

Like I said, the high contrast level is important, and I couldn't agree more with your sentiment.

Nonetheless, the original comment said something to the effect of, your post should have black text if you are making an argument for using black text. It is nit-picky to highlight that your page had dark gray text, but I only did this after you made the inaccurate claim that the page was using black text (as compared to the Apple page, which does use black text).

So it is not really the use of black or dark gray that is important, but the use of high contrast background to foreground colors. Black/gray has little to do with it. And, gray is particularly problematic because it is likely the color that is most often used appropriately, and simultaneously the color that most often used inappropriately - depending on how dark/light the shade happens to be. I mostly wanted to highlight the often present (and an oh-so-intended pun) 'gray areas' in these discussions.

High contrast - definitely, black - maybe. It's a good discussion, and there's a lot of potential depth here, as with most design issues. Apologies if I came off as nit-picking or flippant, it really wasn't the intent.

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