[antisthenes]

I could not agree with this more.

As someone with less than perfect vision, I've seen far too many websites embrace the "greyness" in design, employing far too light shades of grey to display their main content.

This is especially evident if using an older monitor with a TN panel. While IPS monitors have become affordable in the last 2-3 years, there was a period of time when they carried a hefty premium, so most consumers are still probably stuck with at least 1 TN panel in their home.

I cannot describe a user experience of reading a low contrast web page on a TN panel as anything but horrible and have had to manually override CSS rules to be able to process the content.

[coldpie]

Apple's developer documents are a particularly awful example of the "grey-on-grey" trend: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/technotes/tn2091/_in...

[jakub_g]

My personal theory is that stuff looks / renders differently on Macs due to them having 1) retina screens, 2) different font smoothing algorithms, 3) glossy screens.

Most designers work exclusively on Macs and they are not even aware of the issue.

In particular, very thin fonts look well on Macs while they look like absolute garbage under Windows (to the point where some serifs are plainly not displayed so you can't recognize the letters).

I also think that certain "gray on gray" combinations on average have higher contrast on Mac displays than on non-Macs.

[edejong]

If it is true that most designers are not aware of the accessibility issues caused by their designs in various environments, how can we still call them designers?

It has always been my deep understanding that the artist is trying to communicate within a constrained space. Without knowing the bounds of this space an artist is truly lost. By constraining, however, the artist is able to focus, form and foster a microcosmos.

The modern web designer is rarely an artist. Web design entails extending of bounds more often than focusing them. Selling out instead of focusing and selling paradigms.

[richforrester]

> If it is true that most designers are not aware of the accessibility issues caused by their designs in various environments, how can we still call them designers?

... penny for every time I heard a developer say something stupid about their own field.

Just because you're not aware of 1 thing, doesn't mean you shouldn't be called a designer anymore. Just so you're aware, your horse is high as a kite.

[tripzilch]

Not so high when it really is the equivalent of an app-developer unaware that an iOS app won't run on Android.

[cpmsmith]

I'd much sooner compare it to an app developer not thinking backward OS compatibility is necessary—far more pervasive

[edit: coherence]

[jarcane]

I own and work on at any given time, all three of Mac, Windows, and Fedora Linux, and let me tell you this shit gets infuriating.

I don't even know why we have the TrueType font standard anymore, if not a goddamn platform on Earth even bothered to render them remotely the same.

You know how hard it is to find a code font you like, when it doesn't even look the same from platform to platform? I've actually given up and gone so far as using old bitmap fonts from the 16-bit era, because at least I can trust those to look the same, in theory. Sometimes even then the Mac's ludicriously overzealous font smoothing will render them unintelligible.

I am impressed at the quality of the Mac's rendering but man alive, it's so extreme sometimes that it's tempting to call any font running on a Mac a derivative work.

The flipside of course is that if you're on any kind of Linux, even getting your font rendering to something like palatable can be all manner of obnoxious, not least because it will even vary from software to software. Tweak the system fonts all you want, it'll do fuck all when your browser decides to just completely override and ignore the system font rendering for it's own, usually uglier, ideas.

This is why designers give up and just design for the Mac. Because ultimately, they want things to look good, and trying to make things look both good, and consistent, on everything, is an intractable nightmare.

[semi-extrinsic]

> The flipside of course is that if you're on any kind of Linux, even getting your font rendering to something like palatable can be all manner of obnoxious

Have you tried Infinality on Linux?

http://www.webupd8.org/2013/06/better-font-rendering-in-linu...

[tripzilch]

> Most "designers" work exclusively on Macs and they are not even aware of the issue.

FTFY. Seriously, if you do all your design work on a particular piece of display hardware and actually are unaware that things tend to display differently on different hardware and in different environments then yes, hand over your "designer" title, please.

I used to have colleagues like that. I didn't tell them this quite as bluntly (because, colleagues) but oh did I wish I could. Have some pride in your work, please. Now this was in the time that "responsive" was not yet a thing (and we were happy when IE7 came out hahaha finally PNG transparency :p).

But today? What is responsive design if not a fundamental awareness that your site is going to look different on different types of hardware? How can a designer get away with such ignorance today?

[majewsky]

> Most designers work exclusively on Macs

An outstanding example of the annoyances this causes is the website of my local tram operator. Here's a screenshot on my notebook: https://twitter.com/stefanmajewsky/status/536948106366304256 -- If you want to compare the rendering on your machine: http://www.dvb.de

[coldpie]

I do development exclusively on Linux so their docs look like this: http://i.imgur.com/80uc91Y.png Urgh. Luckily Firefox's Inspect Element lets me turn off their awful stylesheets and make them legible.

[overloaded]

That's terrifying. You should do whatever it is that makes Linux have good fonts.

http://i.imgur.com/AawrGCc.png

[jablan]

It's not really fair to compare that with Retina output. But yes, lot can be done to improve Linux font rendering.

[tripzilch]

Similarly, the site is optimized by Apple for viewing on an Apple, also not fair. I don't see why I couldn't make a page on Linux render like that. And odds are very good it would look better on other OSes by default without extra effort, vs the other way around (bonus for playing the free & open game).

Also what has this to do with Retina? I always assumed Retina is just a resolution thing, right? But the screenshots are the same resolution.

[coldpie]

Alternatively, Apple could not use grey-on-grey color schemes.

[patrickburke]

Try high contrast chrome extension choose increased contrast

[ethanbond]

Was the site that's linked to here too hard to read?

[theGimp]

It was for me. I don't have bad vision by the way. It's just that I decided not to zoom in this time to experience the website properly. Once I got the the grey colour step, it was clear that the top comment here would be about it ... for good reason :)

That said, great presentation and a lot of great advice in this submission.

[mynegation]

It was awful. Things went well before and after the text contrast thing,