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by chrisseaton 2558 days ago
It's 92% contrast, and passes Web Content Accessibility Guidelines at the highest AAA standard for contrast. What more do you want?

https://contrast-ratio.com/#black-on-rgb%28246%2C%20246%2C%2...

3 comments

Not OP, but at default zoom level, the text is too thin - most of the pixels aren't actually black - they are subpixels smeared across two columns.
Yup - for me, each ascender of an "h" is a line of red pixels next to a line of blue, no actual black at any point.

Removing the unnecessary font-weight CSS makes it better. Personally I also find it more readable if I remove the font specification and let it fall back to Serif, and it also takes up less vertical space, but that's a matter of personal taste. Not tried it on mobile.

> Yup - for me, each ascender of an "h" is a line of red pixels next to a line of blue, no actual black at any point.

Each of your pixels is made of a tiny red, green, and blue pixels. The 'black pixel' is the gap between the red and blue sub-pixels (the green being off is black.)

As demonstrated in this article[0], font weight is critical for accessibility, even if the contrast passes WCAG "at any size."

[0]https://medium.com/@mandy.michael/creating-accessible-text-6...

[1]https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/visual-audio-cont...

>What more do you want?

100% contrast. People went to great effort to achieve the highest possible contrast in print, e.g. with barium sulfate coated paper, optical brighteners in paper, single-use carbon film typewriter ribbons, oil based inks so pigments could be used instead of dyes, etc. Contrast is good. The only good reason I can think of to use less than 100% is for syntax highlighting.

People don't want contrast that is too high or too low.

http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/itc/CMU-ITC-089.p...

The accessibility guidelines account for this.

#000000 on #ffffff passes the guidelines with AAA level too. If it strains your eyes then your monitor is set too bright.
Well we could also say that if the contrast on this website is too low then your monitor is not set bright enough.

Ultimately it's a matter of taste isn't it?