> Has nobody heard about accessibility? Or do they not care, because “I can read it”.

Genuinely, no. For those who have it, vision is such an integral part of...well, existence that intuitively grasping that people have completely different ways of perceiving it beyond the obvious is extremely difficult. This goes a bit beyond the "try to explain 'blue' to someone" troupe. I have difficulties explaining my own brand of vision difficulties (or hearing difficulties, for that matter) without basically explaining the optics of vision and going from there.

For instance, for folks with without some kind of color difficulties, being able to look at two colors (what most would perceive as) completely different colors and being able to say "those colors would look the same to color blind folks" is almost impossible without training or extra tools.

So no, it doesn't occur to someone without training to constant question their own perception, unfortunately. The most we can do is give web masters a shout when we notice and promote accessibility tools wherever we can

I get what you're saying, but decreasing vision acuity is one thing everybody in this world is guaranteed to run into (barring an early death, that is).

100% agree. As someone who is sadly now closer to 50 than 40, I have endured a marked decrease in my ability to focus on things close to my eyes, such as ... my phone. This is especially painful for me because for most of my life I have had better than average vision. I still have great vision at a distance, but at arm's length I struggle. And reading glasses make me ill. It kinda sucks.

So I completely appreciate accessibility options. I've tweaked my iPhone settings to improve contrast wherever possible. What annoys me a lot is how many app designers think some form of gray-on-gray text is perfectly readable. No, no it's not. Black on white, white on black. Something with more contrast, please.

I also don't think it would be the firs time younger people do not comprehend the difficulties of aging, but that's a whole other bowl of wax

The contrast ratio between #000000 and #8F9BA8 is 7.42:1 which passes accessibility guidelines.

> For many of us, some of these combinations are not very readable. That is why 4.5:1 is a minimal contrast ratio.

Having a thin stroke (the space font face) and small character size (18 px, which is a 12 pt equivalent) for your typeface typically means that you need to increase the contrast to compensate.

In other words, 7.5:1 is insufficient given the design choices. Even if it's "legal".

Guidelines are only a map, they are not the territory. The eye of the beholder is more important than the contrast ratio.

I'm 25 and this is still a little uncomfortable to read.

Heh, the whole page just looks black to me, and I have normal vision and the latest version of Firefox.

When I was a teen white text on black was easy to read and cool. I remember my dad making a comment about how it was hard to read and a bit incredulous that I was fine with it. As I got older, not so much in certain contexts. The author is probably young.

I checked Chrome DevTools and it looks accessible. even though, it's hard to read.

Chrome tools will tell you if it meets the minimum "don't sue me" standards, not whether it's readable. Their other choices - thin stroke font, minimal font size - make the contrast insufficient.

Just use Reader View to make it more accessible.

Perhaps an unpopular opinion but I thought the opposite, was very easy on the eyes.

Also, I think the issue isn't contrast, but line weight

Pro tip: Ctrl+Alt+R in firefox :-)

This appears to do absolutely nothing.

Reader mode. The key combination will change by OS.

Looks like a Windows combination to me and it's not what FF uses for the Reader mode.

Maybe he's talking about reader view which, for me, can be enabled with F9 or clicking the icon in the address bar (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...)