[Maru]

I just realized this is a click bait-y title But not everything is as it seems...

How the Web Became Unreadable
https://backchannel.com/how-the-web-...1b6#.6qtjovdsb

I thought my eyesight was beginning to go. It turns out, I’m suffering from design.

It’s been getting harder for me to read things on my phone and my laptop. I’ve caught myself squinting and holding the screen closer to my face. I’ve worried that my eyesight is starting to go.

These hurdles have made me grumpier over time, but what pushed me over the edge was when Google’s App Engine console — a page that, as a developer, I use daily — changed its text from legible to illegible. Text that was once crisp and dark was suddenly lightened to a pallid gray. Though age has indeed taken its toll on my eyesight, it turns out that I was suffering from a design trend.

There’s a widespread movement in design circles to reduce the contrast between text and background, making type harder to read. Apple is guilty. Google is, too. So is Twitter.

Typography may not seem like a crucial design element, but it is. One of the reasons the web has become the default way that we access information is that it makes that information broadly available to everyone. “The power of the Web is in its universality,” wrote Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web consortium. “Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.”

But if the web is relayed through text that’s difficult to read, it curtails that open access by excluding large swaths of people, such as the elderly, the visually impaired, or those retrieving websites through low-quality screens. And, as we rely on computers not only to retrieve information but also to access and build services that are crucial to our lives, making sure that everyone can see what’s happening becomes increasingly important.

We should be able to build a baseline structure of text in a way that works for most users, regardless of their eyesight. So, as a physicist by training, I started looking for something measurable.

It wasn’t hard to isolate the biggest obstacle to legible text: contrast, the difference between the foreground and background colors on a page. In 2008, the Web Accessibility Initiative, a group that works to produce guidelines for web developers, introduced a widely accepted ratio for creating easy-to-read webpages.

To translate contrast, it uses a numerical model. If the text and background of a website are the same color, the ratio is 1:1. For black text on white background (or vice versa), the ratio is 21:1. The Initiative set 4.5:1 as the minimum ratio for clear type, while recommending a contrast of at least 7:1, to aid readers with impaired vision. The recommendation was designed as a suggested minimum contrast to designate the boundaries of legibility. Still, designers tend to treat it as as a starting point.

Read More: https://backchannel.com/how-the-web-...1b6#.6qtjovdsb

[Maru]

I can't stand this practice. At least text now is scaling upwards. Especially on sites that accomodate text size according to how wide you have the viewport (The window)

I have perfect vision, but my husband doesn't have the greatest eyes. I have noticed he had trouble reading the lighter text after the domain name on address bars when sitting a certain distance. He can if he reads up close, but this is hard on the eyes and back if you have to lean repeatedly. We did get him a 27" inch to reduce the leaning.

Doesn't help that people are sitting for longer and longer periods of time at the computer and so may be suffering from eyestrain if staring at screens all day... pro tip, I have three screens on my main desktop. I noticed if I do what my color calibrator says and reduce lumens to around 80-120 which is supposed to be relatively close to the contrast of paper, I very rarely have eye strain now nor do I have those horrible looking dark circles underneath my eyes... it looks very dark at first when I first did it, but once you I adjusted, I noticed I could sit longer periods of time to work and will have less headaches.


Anyone else who has struggled/is struggling with eyestrain when looking at screens?