Wait how? It's quite contrasty, plenty for comfortable readability, more so than many other sites. Even without my glasses (strong astigmatism and near sightedness), this is not a bad site.

The font differs, as usual, significantly between platforms and browsers though. Is it possible that you have poor black levels and maybe an overly blurred font rendition?

Astigmatism could also contribute here, as it leads to lines in certain orientations (e.g. vertical) being harder to distinguish than others—this can severely limit font legibility.

It's possibly the lighting or the monitor but I don't have a problem with using any other websites in this configuration.

The orange on gray has a 2.5:1 contrast ratio, the main body text (dark gray on gray) is 4.1:1, both of which are below the WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility minimum of 4.5:1

Orange on gray is not great, but that's only the headlines, which are also much larger which takes care of the worst problems.

Based on those numbers it would appear to me that the main text is only slightly below perfect accessibility in the contrast department, so it shouldn't be a problem at all unless you have bigger problems.

The 4.5:1 ratio is a minimum not a perfect score.

The guidelines are for accessibility—minimum/recommended score would presumably be set so that someone with moderate vision disability would not at all be troubled.

That puts it way above what someone with good eyesight should need for comfortable reading.

I am mostly questioning it being hard to read, with good color/font rendering, for someone with good eyesight. Mine is pretty bad, and while ugly, it wasn't hard to read at all.

I love HN for this, thank you for teaching me about contrast space in a vuln thread!