Its like they see it, and be like "Ah, everyone who bought it got screwed over, and it will hurt our brand, but its still cheaper to quietly ignore it". Despisable
It's the same with designers doing their light-grey text on a white background with their 8K colour-perfect screen in optimal lighting conditions, and then when you point out this is difficult to read they go "I don't see the problem!"
Because the designers I’ve worked with would never ship that. But maybe I’ve just worked with competent designers.
- Neo4j docs: https://neo4j.com/docs/cypher-manual/current/introduction/cy...
- RabbitMQ docs (esp. that sidebar): https://www.rabbitmq.com/docs/reliability
- Argo Workflows UI (no link, as you need to login).
- CV from "senior UX engineer" I received yesterday in response to a job ad I posted.
- Just now I found https://www.nngroup.com/articles/low-contrast/ when searching for something else – the quote at the top is nigh-unreadable due to the "font-weight: 250" which has the same kind of effect as low-contrast grey text.
- I've also had some discussions with designers over the years. Some view their work as "art" and get incredibly defensive about even minor changes done for real pragmatic reasons. Of course, there are also plenty other more pragmatic and competent designers out there.
- HN does it for downvoted/dead comments and "text posts" such as ask/show HN. Dang said it's a feature. Many disagree.
It's not as prevalent as it once was – it was even worse 10 years ago – but it's still encountered fairly regularly.
Font weight is a crucial factor of readability, and it depends on screen specifics. On my 2020 M1 mbp at ~40% screen brightness, the NNGroup link quote is quite readable. As it is on my phone.
I don't rate any designer or developer very highly if they're too precious about their "art".
The HN dead/downvoted comments is contentious for sure. I don't agree with the choice fwiw.
It's all "readable" in the sense of "I can read it", but not in the sense of "I can read it effortlessly". I have a bit of CSS in Stylus to fix it, and it takes noticeably less effort to read it with a "normal" font. The RabbitMQ menu is just so much easier to scan as well with a more normal colour.
And agreed that readability is a scale and it’s best to be on the “easy” end of that scale.
They also love to disable the mouse scroll and the scrollbars, so the page has 300 more settings but you have no way of knowing that (this also happened to me on windows 11 btw).
It reached the point where I implemented my own script to bypass the GUI at work.