Uchū – Color palette for internet lovers

Have you tried running any readability analysis on this? Feels like the contrast on the background and foreground is too low to make for comfortable (long term) reading.

I think there's too much focus on 'readability' these days. At work we have a new team that's making us measure all the contrasts for people with reading difficulties. Contrast has to be > 80% or something. And text sizes huge. And they don't allow us to change our themes. Or to install plugins like dark reader "for security".

Problem is, it makes everything super fugly and eye-straining for everyone else (considering no dark reader allowed anymore). And it's much harder to see which parts are important and which aren't. Because everything is super bold and screamy. I didn't buy a 4.7 million colour display to only show 10 of them. I tend to get headaches from really high contrast, I prefer using a softer theme like solarized.

The 0.5% of employees with vision issues would be equally well served with a browser plugin that adjusts it for their particular issue. Not everyone with visual difficulties has the same issue, after all. Some people can't see certain colour combinations so they need to be avoided or modified. Some just see blurry so they need large fonts but probably even larger than they are now. Some can't see at all and they're not helped by this either, they just need a braille ruler and good alt tags on images. Which is something nobody in the company seems to care about. They just care about things that are super noticeable.

We used to have a nice gentle email signature that is now all kindergarten colours and huge fonts and it's just so in your face. For something that nobody ever reads anyway. It was de-emphasised for a reason, so people know it's there but that it's not important information unless you're really looking for it. If you really want to read it you can always just highlight it. Or switch to plain text mode.

Ps: I'm not against catering for disabilities at all, but I'd like to see a more tailored approach. Not trying to fix one thing and breaking it for everyone else. I don't set my phone on huge text mode either but I'm happy it's there for people that do need it.

I'm not colorblind, but I'm older, and I can't read the kind of low-contrast stuff I wouldn't even notice as being low-contrast in my 20s or 30s.

An honest interest, have you tried a dark mode on any device? Every time I tried it (sometimes as a new default setting after update for some JetBrains IDE), I did not like it at all for some reason as too much eye stress.