HN Explorer

Ask HN: Light grey text is killing my eyes.

47 points by zepolen ↗ HN
Self posts like this one have very low contrast when they use grey text and I find it impossible to read them.

In contrast, the comments which are in black text are easy to read.

Can something be done about this?

42 comments

[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 48.7 ms ] thread
alabut
I haven't seen a rationale for it yet but I'd guess that it's a subtle way of encouraging descriptions to be short (like the one you just wrote), it's probably intentional that it's hard to read long rambling posts like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=468139

I read a pg comment somewhere that makes me think that's his design decision - he already weighs "Ask HN" type of posts differently than the standard one with links, for example. Maybe it's to ward off too much navel-gazing.

zepolen
That was in fact the post that triggered this one. I gave up reading it after the second paragraph.

However it was mainly because I wasn't interested in the topic, but had checked all the other articles out. There are some long self posts that are genuinely interesting to read and it still hurts my eyes to read them.

mattmcknight
Maybe it should get progressively more grey then as you get longer and longer.
alabut
Very interesting idea. Do you mean each paragraph in a post gets lighter as it goes on or the color for the entire comment block fades depending on overall length?
roberto
Then limit the size of the textarea or something like that. It's bad usage, and saying that "it's a feature, not a bug" doesn't help.
alabut
Not sure that limiting the textarea would help - it's not like it constrains the length of these replies, for example. It's pretty trivial to compose a block of text in Textmate and paste it in, I'll often do that just for the spell checking or to make sure it doesn't get lost in submission or browser crash or whatever. (and often to review and make sure I don't post something I'll regret)
jeffesp
I believe that this form submits to a process on a server that could limit the number of characters that are allowed in the textarea.
pg
Yes; I do this to discourage people from making too many such posts, and making them too long. I don't want HN to turn into a blogging platform. Also, I wanted to make it easy to tell these posts from comments. If I made the text black I'd have to make it smaller, and then it would look just like a comment.

But I'm not wedded to the current way of doing things. I'd be open to alternatives.

alabut
The fact that people are complaining about not being able to read longer blocks of text means it's working just fine. And it's a nice subtle touch - I never consciously considered why I tend to ignore rambling posts and stick to the discussion area instead until now.
jrockway
It seems like this system punishes me, the reader, for something that the poster did wrong. If the poster is supposed to write his long rants on his blog and then link them here, the software should tell him. It shouldn't subtly make his stuff harder for me to read, because if I'm interested, I'm going to push through the low contrast text anyway.

Anyway, if you want to nurture the community, I don't think it's a bad idea to make the feedback deliberate. "This is too long, don't post it," will be a lot more effective than changing the color of the text.

alabut
Well, the lighter text does punish the original poster, indirectly. It lowers the likelihood of engagement by an audience and I like that subtle approach more than heavy-handed alert warnings. Sites that have that kind of approach feel like I'm in the principal's office and being scolded for no good reason. Subtle encouragement to do other types of behavior feels more like I'm in a hippie montessori school instead - we're not going to come down with the stick if you behave a certain way, but we're not going to give you the carrot unless you do better.
AndrewWarner
I'm not sure it discourages long posts. The writer doesn't see it's gray until the text is posted.
[dead] ram1024
it's not so much the grey as it's ON GREY BACKGROUND as well

looks like the same color as the link text so maybe it was just something that fell through and never got addressed

kennyroo
Light gray text is a DTD (designer-transmitted disease) that's rapidly infecting sites across the Internet.

(When it's really light, I use Firebug to modify the CSS.)

eatenbyagrue
I second that. The designers I work with have this fetish for low contrast designs that may be super mod and hip, but seem to lower usability to me.

In general I agree that black on white might be a little harsh, but when you have squint to make out the text it's over the top.

Retric
One option under Firefox is View > Page Style > No Style.

It's black text on a white background, but you lose indenting. I tend to use this when I want to read text from a site that's really hard to read.

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alabut
Easy on the anti-designer bigotry there, dude, it's only the crappy designers that use super low contrast text just because they think it's cool. That's not the case here - see my comment below and pg's confirmation for a rational discussion behind its usage here on HN, it's a very intentional decision and serves the intent well.

Now whether the intent is right or not (should HN morph more into a Metafilter-like free-for-all message board for hacker types, rather than a structured conversation around links?) is a different discussion. I like the current orientation towards news.

ewiethoff
Remember CSS Zen Garden (http://www.csszengarden.com/) and The Zen of CSS Design book? And Zeldman (http://www.zeldman.com/)? Way cool when cutting edge designers were figuring out what CSS 2.1 is capable of. But such low contrast! And lots of tan. Then the candy-colors-on-white "Web 2.0" look hit... Another year, another DTD.
jorgem
If you use firefox, you might want to look into STYLISH or GREASEMONKEY.

Both provide ways to change the look of any website.

vaksel
why not let people pick their own color schemes? Like we do with the top bar.
babo
So back to coding! :-)
edw519
Ctrl-A
transburgh
wow, was not ready for that. Just made it look cluttered
dfranke
Okay, my cursor is at the beginning of the line. Now what?
jeroen
For firefox, put this in your user stylesheet

@-moz-document url-prefix(http://news.ycombinator.com/){ td { color: #000000 !important; } td.subtext { color: #828282 !important; } }

see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467680 for more info.

jpcosta
This is a neat idea but it's no good for me because I read HN from several places and I don't want to manually create a user style sheet in each one.
light3
Or if you're like me and find all the white backgrounds hurt your eyes, its simple to enforce black background / green text which makes reading much easier on the eyes, it also makes grey text easier to read.
stern
Thanks for the tip.

Does anyone have good designs that stray from the general HN look?

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anc2020
Use your mouse to quickly highlight the text. Now you can read it as light grey on blue, which is much easier.
smokey_the_bear
I get a weird bright yellow on dark gray, which is even harder to read
redorb
I like using a simple CTRL+A to highlight all text on page; (windows xp, ff3.05)
dmoo
If you browse with opera try view-style and select the option that suits your needs.
FredSource
I think reading the light gray is a problem. Obviously there are other design considerations - personally I'd go a little darker!

.. or to be really geeky, add a button to darken the color in the menu bar (simply change the .css with a little javascript!)

nazgulnarsil
The factory settings of most LCD's is WAY too bright. Try dimming your screen a little. I have no trouble reading it at all.