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Comment by literalAardvark | Hacker News Reader

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As someone who is colorblind and has some vision issues I take offense to that as I struggle with those design choices. It's clear someone with the ability to distinguish color and clarity designs those sites with no consideration for others.

The most accessible design is not picking colors at all, but letting users or user agents pick the color scheme and only providing the content.

Deferring such decisions to the end user is an ABSENCE of design.

Partly! And that's a good thing, IMO. E.g. providing just the content (think markdown, e.g.) and letting the end user agent render it in a standard way that the user wants is what I had in mind. Like good ole HTML from 1995 :)

That's conflating content and design.

Also, where else are these expectations in society? I think accessible websites are important for equitable access to content, services and tools for those with disabilities, but nobody provides "content only" designs for concert posters where the user is expected to create their own art around it. Nobody who is making a movie supplies the script as the only creative output for the market. Nobody dumps a plaintext unformatted version of a book or research paper expecting you to format it yourself. Nobody creates a comic book which consists only the speech bubbles. Nobody should be expected to produce web sites that are just content.

It's interesting that you provide movie posters as an example. That's literally advertising. At some point the web evolved from being a simple text-based document format to becoming animated, linkable magazines and an endless barrage of advertising. It evolved to look pretty to entertain and entice people, not to inform them.

> Nobody dumps a plaintext unformatted version of a book or research paper expecting you to format it yourself.

Have you read a novel? It's just text in paragraphs.

> Nobody should be expected to produce web sites that are just content.

I think you're taking an extreme viewpoint. Have a look at all the markdown on GitHub. Clearly markdown is great for a lot of content. It isn't great for a lot of marketing.

You're taking the extreme view that I mentioned an ad and that invalidated the rest of the examples. Try not cherry picking?

>Have you read a novel? It's just text in paragraphs.

I take offense to this attack. Have _you_ ever opened a novel?

Typesetting matters a whole lot. Go convert an novel's .epub to .txt and ditch all of the fancy design, read it start to finish and tell me it's the same quality of experience. It isn't and you know it isn't. Hell, even different size prints of the same book are differently enjoyable. Your rants about ads do not invalidate the merits of design.

This is ad absurdum.

“The best design is doing nothing at all!”

The grey UI aspect gets even worse when you use it on certain monitors. It's not that the greys even blend together, no, they are the same color. Looking at you, light mode discord.

Colorblind have more issues distinguishing shades including shades of grade. These are made by people who see colors too well.

Or people who turn the brightness up on their monitor to "make the sun look dim in comparison".

My TV has its backlight set to '0' (OLED, and a non-real property to set as no 'backlight', but still a metric). If I set it to 100 my eyes bleed. My current monitor with a real backlight has it set to 5. Yes, 5 out of 100.

I think grey on grey works, if the very walls behind you are being bleached by the intensity of the light coming off the monitor.

And those monitors aren't any monitors, they're glossy expensive Apple monitors.

In what world are colourblind designers making grey-on-grey UIs? This is a wild statement, and this phrasing...

> You don't have to drag everyone to your level in the name of accessibility.

is gross.

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