Stop Using Grey Text
catskull.net
Dear web designers:
  • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyzEnglish
    2·
    4 days ago

    Sensible advice (don’t use this sort of grey), bullshit reason and facepalm-worthy analogy:

    I actually believe increasing contrast for everyone improves the information density of our content. It literally becomes higher fidelity. It’s like taking a WAV file, converting to a 1kbps MP3, and then re-converting to a WAV file. You just footgunned yourself my dude! You should not do that.

    No.

    For text the information is encoded in the characters, that are abstract units. A “t” written in black conveys the exact same information as a “t” written in grey on white. What matters is if you’re using a “t” instead of a “d” or a “τ” or whatever. As such, information density won’t be affected by your questionable colour choices. Nor fidelity, because the information itself isn’t changing.

    For audio things are different. Audio doesn’t work through those abstract units, you care about the sound wave; and that sound wave will get distorted once you convert the WAV into the 1kbps MP3.

    The real reason to not use this sort of grey is that it’ll always give you a low contrast, no matter what you pair it with. And both excessively high and excessively low contrasts are harder to read and will tire the readers’ eyes down, doubly so for the ones with poor eyesight.