> Pure black is the correct color for text. Ink and paper manufacturers go to great lengths to make inks and papers with the darkest blacks and brightest whites, and there's no reason text on screen should be any different.
Is this your opinion or is this widely accepted as fact? I've read countless design suggestions to reduce contrast and avoid using pure black or white on an LED display. I'm curious whether there's research that supports either side.
> I've read countless design suggestions to reduce contrast and avoid using pure black or white on an LED display.
I have seen those suggestions too, but they seem to be just parroted off of each other. I have never seen a single one link to any reasoning or studies that support the claims of better readability. They all seem to say it because someone else said it in a game of design telephone.
In my personal experience, I find gray text on an off-white background to be very difficult and straining to read, and additionally, I don't think it looks good.
I can see some merit in reducing the whiteness and thus brightness of the background, but I don't see why reducing black to some lighter black or gray helps at all. Having text in a nice solid black or near-black with an off-white background seems reasonable to me. That matches more closely with reading things on actual paper, where dark black inks are possible but the background is not pure white. That leaves legibility in place and reduces background brightness.
It's possible this whole "reduce the contrast" thing has gotten off track, when to me at least, the goal seems to be to reduce the blinding background blasting you with light and not to simply reduce contrast.
> I have seen those suggestions too, but they seem to be just parroted off of each other. I have never seen a single one link to any reasoning or studies that support the claims of better readability. They all seem to say it because someone else said it in a game of design telephone.
I so wish I could find that research that once and for all debunked the "UX expert" urban myth that #fff + #000 = evil. It made me consider past mistakes and I go for all black on all white whenever I can. Doesn't hurt from a WCAG perspective.
Unfortunately browsers have lots of objectively bad defaults (e.g. h1 { font-size: 200%; }) so we have to decide which defaults we should fix and which ones we should leave alone.
I agree that the user should have browser defaults that they prefer, but motherfuckingwebsite.com still looks awful in most browsers.
>" I've read countless design suggestions to reduce contrast and avoid using pure black"
>"I've read countless design suggestions to reduce contrast"
I would say that modern design suggestion often the opposite of usability/ergonomics. On many sites you now often see undecipherable light grey text on white background. It sure is soothing. It also sure is useless as many people who do not have perfect vision are unable to actually read it without blowing text size out of proportion.
Fortunately ultra-light (sub-pixel stroke width) grey fonts on grey backgrounds as a design trend has been receding again. Rule of thumb: The lighter the font, the bigger the face needs to be! Ultra-light is okay for a hero text that's literally 100 pixels tall, but never for body text.
Yeah, I don't buy it either. Books can be printed on anything a publisher wants, yet most books use a creamy paper rather than the whitest white they can get.
Tony and UX Movement is chock full of bad advice, doesn't do proper research and can't take criticism at all. I would avoid it at all costs. Feel free to read his "article" "The Aesthetic-Accessibility Paradox" and "Why radio buttons and checkboxes can't coexist" and read the comments to those and see what I mean.
Is this your opinion or is this widely accepted as fact? I've read countless design suggestions to reduce contrast and avoid using pure black or white on an LED display. I'm curious whether there's research that supports either side.