[greggturkington]

Agreed, it's not accessible; if you write your own accessible theme, it will have an accessible theme.

Your apartment building doesn't have a wheelchair ramp? That's on purpose. If you don't agree with it it's trivial to buy a bag of concrete and build one.

[Zababa]

> Your apartment building doesn't have a wheelchair ramp? That's on purpose. If you don't agree with it it's trivial to buy a bag of concrete and build one.

That's a bad metaphor. First it's not possible to build a wheelchair ramp in your apartment building without affecting everyone else. Second, a custom CSS is very easy to make compared to a wheelchair ramp. Third, the comments being hard to read is, again, on purpose. I don't know the precise reason behind it, from what I understand it's part of the numerous tools that HN has to try to be a better place for discussion online than the rest. Some other tools seems to be: dead comments not being visible by default, new accounts having their names highlighted, the "reply" button not being here on "deep" threads in the "regular tree view".

If you don't agree with this decision, that's fine but that doesn't mean everyone is aligned with you.

[greggturkington]

Yes, a custom CSS theme is easy to make, for web developers. https://pastebin.com/aMYiGr05

It's not for my friend, who's a contractor. He finds working with concrete to be easy though. I don't.

Being inaccessible on purpose doesn't change the fact that it's inaccessible.

[Zababa]

I don't think it's that hard for non web developers. The rule is commtext { color: black; }. I think that adding an option (like showdead) would be better, as it doesn't require people to take the time to find out by themselves. Again, your comparaison doesn't really hold.

> Being inaccessible on purpose doesn't change the fact that it's inaccessible.

It explains why it still is though.

[greggturkington]

> The rule is commtext { color: black; }

No it's not, it's more complicated: https://pastebin.com/aMYiGr05 (and there's no "commtext" class). So it's literally harder than you think, and you're presumably a developer. So how about the average user?

> It explains why it still is though.

Um, ok? And the building only has stairs because the architect didn't consider the needs of people that use assistive devices like wheelchairs. What's your point? "Why?" was not in question.

[Zababa]

There is a commtext class tough. Tested on Chrome and Firefox. I don't know what your linked pastebin does but if you just want all the comments to show up as black text, the rule commtext { color: black; } in the body is all you need. Please check that kind of information by yourself before assuming that I'm wrong.

> Um, ok? And the building only has stairs because the architect didn't consider the needs of people that use assistive devices like wheelchairs.

Using metaphors doesn't help, they don't hold. Unless you assume that there is some people that are considered undesirable and that are also being kept out by having only stairs? And that aren't correlated to people that use assistive devices like wheelchairs?

> What's your point? "Why?" was not in question.

Why is why not in question? HN breaks accessibility guidelines in an easily fixable ways for reasons that are related to the primary purpose of the website. I think at this point it's just a difference of values between us. You seem to think that accessibility guidelines should matter above everything, I think it's fine to break them when it's needed for the "purpose" of the website. One other example of that would be "old internet" website, with flashing text, non-legible text and everything. On these websites, not respecting the guidelines is fine for me.

[greggturkington]

Do you understand what a "class" is in HTML? Do you understand that the class "commtext" doesn't appear anywhere in the source code for HN? The comment colors are controlled by classes like "c00" etc. Chrome has a tool called "DevTools" you can use that will show you. Here's the CSS for this site: https://news.ycombinator.com/news.css

Again, you don't understand it, but want to tell everyone else how easy it is...

> not respecting the guidelines is fine for me

in contrast I think everyone should be able to use the web, that it should be accessible. This isn't important to you, but sometimes you have to think about other people with a limited set of abilities in a compassionate way. The GP mentions "bad design" and I mentioned an objective measure: text that can't be read by someone without writing code.