Gray/soft and hard to read text

I engaged the management and they responded thusly.

"Anne, for some reason, perhaps out of some artistic aspect, your website text is grayish instead of black. This makes it hard to read - try it yourself.

Strangely, there is a "Printer Friendly" on your page, and this causes a black on white image, - far clearer by the way. This means that the only way for the page to print, it must be rendered black on white.

I can not see any valid reason why the website test should be rendered in gray, except to slow down readers.

I suggest you look into this. The web site people can easily change the site and you can tell them to make the text black on white in the future. "

and they responded as follows:

"Dear Bill,

I contacted our webmaster who offered the following. “We intentionally chose the current color scheme to give the site a softer feel. In the past 4 years yours is the first complaint we’ve had about the site”.

The print friendly option you refer to omits all images, to save on printer ink, rather than simply to print the page in black which would happen on all non-color printers. It completely reformats the page into just text, with no color at all.

Thanks for sharing your comments with us. It’s always good to review what we’re doing and see if it can be improved.

Best regards,

xxxx"

My rejoinder was : "Anne, a large number of people simply skip your site as a nuisance to read. This so called 'softer feel' is ridiculous.

Let me do the same to the books you read....?