Design patterns on the web are constantly changing, largely because of the enormous influence some companies have over other sites. Once a new trend is established, the rest try to keep up as best they can, but sometimes the effects aren't so positive. According to British Kevin Marks, founder of Microformats and former vice president of web services at British Telecom, there is a massive movement that is making the web increasingly difficult to read, and he blames a reduction in contrast between fonts and their background.
Few can ignore this widespread change in styles and interfaces across certain services and pages. On the one hand, the goal is to optimize content for increasingly mobile web sessions, thanks to smartphones, phablets, tablets, and hybrid computers. On the other, the abandonment of 3D effects, transparencies, and other similar details is notable; however, there's something else. A large part of the web focuses on text, and yet there are times when it's not that easy to read.
The Problem with Contrast
This obviously harms people with vision problems, including older adults, but it could affect those of us who still have excellent eyesight (whether by miracle, chance, or a genetic quirk). According to blogger, programmer, and Microformats founder Kevin Marks, the cause is simple: The major companies in the market insist on reducing the contrast between text and its background.
Apparently, Google doesn't apply its recommended contrast ratio.
The Companies at Fault
One of the essential features that has historically been highlighted about the web is its universality, but if what it offers is hard to read, that benefit goes down the drain. Marks names three companies as responsible for this change: Apple, Google, and Twitter. The relationship between perfect black and perfect white (or vice versa) when presenting text is 21:1. The popular recommendation is for designers to aim for a 7:1 ratio for their texts, but Marks discovered that those who make such suggestions don't follow them. The two most obvious cases are Apple and Google with their "typographic indications". Both set a minimum ratio of 4.5:1 although they recommend 7:1, and their texts are 5.5:1 and 4.6:1 respectively.
If we compare this to the first examples of text on the web, even among what we might call "thin fonts", the difference is enormous. One of the bases for favoring lighter text comes from Typography Handbook, a reference guide for web designers that recommends a very dark gray (#333) instead of pure black (#000), because it's supposed that such a strong contrast is also bad for the eyes.
The rest falls into the speculative and subjective, something Marks himself can't avoid, since his final opinion is to "ignore the trends" and "return to the roots" of printing: The typeface should be black, and change the font or its weight instead of playing with grays. What do you think?
