A Little Typographical Rant

I’ve got cataracts, and thanks to a combination of bureaucratic CF at the doctor, at my new insurance company, and sure enough thanks to Obamacare, I still haven’t been able to get them fixed. (May. Maybe.)

For those of you who’ve never had them, the effect is more or less like having really dirty glasses all the time. Small print is hard. (Small print in Chinese is really hard, I have to resort of a magnifying glass.) You lose contrast, and glare washes out everything.

Now, here I am, reading web pages. I’m not going to mention who I’m using as an example, because it’s not Pejman Yousefzadeh’s fault, it’s some damn hipster web designer, who probably wears plaid pajamas and drinks hot chocolate while talking to his mommy and daddy about healthcare. But here’s a fragment of text:

Notice anything about it? Like it’s a little washed out looking?

So I apply my mad web skillz, and discover the background is, yes, white, but the text color is (102,102,102), or in hex #666.

This is called, technically “40 percent gray.” In other words, it’s 60 percent white. The text color is more white than not.

This is 40 percent gray. Does this look black to you?

I mean, WTF? Are we supposed to read this?

It seems to be a trend too. A little googling and I find that #666 is a very popular text color. It’s supposed to be “easier on the eyes.”

Dear web designers: Go buy a book. You know, those paper things? I realize they’re old fashioned, but buy one. Or borrow one for crying out loud.

Open the book. What color is the text? That’s right, it’s black. Or damn near black. A 90 percent gray maybe. If it’s a recent book, and a textbook, it might even be some color like a dark Williamsburg blue. It’s not 40 percent gray.

Oh, and using like 10 point font is silly too, but that’s a rant for another time.

For those of you who find this nonsense hard to read, there’s actually a handy web site called readability.com. What they do is take a web page, strip it of the hipster cutenesses, and present it in a reasonably-large font, using black text. (Or nearly black — it’s actually a slightly yellow-green close to 90 percent gray. But it’s close to black.) Then it looks like this: