Comments on: Why You Should Never Use Pure Black for Text or Backgrounds

By: Ralph Bedwell

Ralph Bedwell — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 01:01:28 +0000

I think you are completely wrong about this, and this movement has done great harm to large numbers of people. You’re also guilty of significant ageism.

I’m reasonably certain that lighter text is fine for younger people. But once a person hits middle age and above, when the ability to accommodate (focus far to near and back again) and when the lens of the eye begins the long, slow process of hardening (which will eventually result in cataracts in the senior years), this is no longer the case. Reading gray text for extended periods causes people who are no longer young to get eyestrain, not the other way around.

Please, ignore this bad advice. Use black text on a white background!

By: DavidB

DavidB — Thu, 08 Dec 2022 18:21:28 +0000

Another reason to avoid full black as the background or foreground is that most displays are less standard, (gamma 2.0 vs sRGB), and are calibrated most poorly near black. This causes the subtle levels used for smoothing fonts to be incorrect.

By: Jane Francis

Jane Francis — Mon, 21 Nov 2022 23:38:13 +0000

What a load of rubbish. The grey text is illegible snd hurts my eyes – cannot read articles now!

By: Hida

Hida — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 15:03:52 +0000

I agree with Glenn, in that it’s important to let the user decide what is the best contrast for them: Pure black or Dark grey for text. I am a designer, transitioned to UX/UI design as of few years ago. When I was doing mostly graphic design work which involved print, for aesthetic reasons, and perhaps reducing harshness, I would use dark grey a lot. I even have done that in website design and digital documentation and still will do. But these days, I am working on a design system. When looking and comparing the grey text and black text (specially when altering the background) I can see visible declination of accessibility. This is regardless of theory and hypothesis. I am only talking based on my own vision experience. I only have been mild priscription glasses as of recent that include a bit of astigmatism. With or without glasses, I am finding the grey text harder to read, specially when put on none white backgrounds. This is just my real life observation, and not a theory. My hope is that we get an opportunity to test with a wide range of audiences – which is almost impossible, and when we can’t let’s allow the user to select between a soft, med, high contrast depending on their vision. A bit more work upfront, but perhaps more accessibility and desirability for users.

By: Glenn

Glenn — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 22:13:08 +0000

My vision is a bit wonky as the result of a TBI I suffered as a child. (My advice? Don’t ever try to pick a fight with gravity.) I was cortically blind for a brief period of time, currently lack binocular vision as my left eye is almost as lazy as a scarecrow, and have a very bad case of light sensitivity. That said, I generally do better with darker colors in life. I prefer night to day as their is less color to “confuse” my eyes and brain. On electronic devices, I prefer red text on black background, but I rarely get to choose a preference. However, when I have designed web pages, for accessibility purposes, I have chosen black text 000000 on white background FFFFFF due to the desire for sharply contrasting color. Having said that, there should be a way to allow the user, rather than the UX designer, to choose a preferred color scheme. Has anybody thought about creating a “choose your own color scheme” script? If a website developer wants to be able to reach as many people as possible, why not insert a browser script in the website to change various color scheme settings. After all, I might like FF0000 for text color, but somebody else is going to prefer C32FAA, chosen at random since I have no way to know what somebody else might like. I don’t think this would be that difficult to do with a text field and a button using JavaScript, or whatever scripting language you prefer. The only colors you would need to control for would be text, unfollowed links, followed links, and background. You’d still have to make sure that your color schemes wouldn’t make any graphics you choose to include difficult to read, so having borders included in the creation of images, not an img or style sheet border addition, would be necessary. I haven’t actually tried to do this yet, but only because I hadn’t read this article yet. Like many, I am not a fan of some of the advice given here, but I’ve always been more solution oriented than just complaining about a problem, even if that is a necessary step to come up with better solutions.