Must we have such pale, nearly unreadable forum text colors?

[susanne]

Of course, as most know, I am amongst the "hard of seeing," but much of this forum's essential text (page numbers, "posted by...", "Select a maximum number of 10 tags...", etc.) is so light as to be barely visible. Even with the text blown up to 300%, these are not readable without eyestrain.

As a professional print graphic designer for over 30 years, I know trends still favor light-colored text, but studies show that people over 40 have difficulty reading and viewing both light-colored and small text. I myself I curbed my designer/art director fondness for these thing for the sake of readability -- long before my own vision took a nosedive. I'm not saying all text should be black -- I just wish we could avoid the pale greys and

I ask that this be changed not so much for my sake, but rather for the many forum readers experiencing the vagaries of over-40 vision.

 

[kristen_tg]

You can set style overrides in your browser. So you could set it so that these forums are always black and white with huge text if you want.

There are also variety of extensions for FireFox, Chrome and Opera that will simplify doing this for you.

 

[susanne]

Yes, I am well aware of that, but being a designer, I don't necessarily wish to view the world (or that that is represented on the internet, in such a stark view. I love colors and graphic elements -- I simply, like many, cannot read text in pale tints. I'm sure many just stop and go elsewhere rather than complain, but I'm feeling cranky today, so thought I'd whine a bit...

 

[kristen_tg]

Due to monitor settings it's entirely possible that it's especially pale on your screen. On mine the contrast is quite good.

And high contrast layouts actually hurt my eyes. Pales are kinder.

I've come to the conclusion from my own projects that no matter what you do, somebody is going to struggle with some aspect of a layout. Font size is too small, too large, layout too wide, layout is too narrows, colors hurt the eyes... I could go on, I've probably heard it all. Just take control of it and set the overrides.

 

[susanne]

Since I earn much of my living doing image correction in Photoshop, my color, brightness and contrast settings are critically important and calibrated regularly, so this is not likely a problem with my monitor.

Nonetheless, I'm happy it's not a problem for you.

 

[Debby - LB]

susanne I agree about the colors. The contrast is good on my monitor too but I've never liked the washed out color plus it's too small to see well. I also don't like the default posting font size, to me it needs to be at least a point larger.

The problem is changing the style sheets. It's a pita having to replace all modified core files after every board update.. and there are a lot of critical updates.

I thought about completely changing the style and skin but in the past style changes on these forums do not go over too well!! but I'll see what I can do, bear with me.

 

[AngC]

My eyesight sucks, and I hate wearing glasses.... I only wear them when I’m driving so I don’t wreck or get arrested or whatever.

One of the reasons I initially liked these forums was due to the default ease of use (visibility-wise.) There are other horse-type forums out there, but they are hugely annoying for me to read.