color combos

[vgqn]

Dear friends,

If you have chosen a color scheme for your LJ pages that involves, oh, say darkish grey text on a lightish grey background, pale blue text on a blue background, or white text on any color background, then, nothing personal, but I'm probably not going to read your pages. Maybe it looks better on your PC than my Mac, or maybe it's just me.

Well, I'll read the parts that appear on my Friends page, in staid black on white, but not the continues or comments. I have regretted this sometimes when I wanted to see where a discussion was going, but the color contrast (or lack thereof) deterred me.

Just sayin'.

Comments

[maureenkspeller.livejournal.com]

Does it look better now?

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

Your page is very legible now, although for me it wasn't that bad to start with. There's another friend of ours where Karen recently posted a comment, and her comment shows as white text on a pink background. I had to tilt my screen to get enough contrast to make it out.

[maureenkspeller.livejournal.com]

Well, I also found it readable ... obviously, given it's my default view from here ... it just hadn't occurred to me that it might be a problem for other people, especially as I recall I had already tinkered somewhat with the contrast. I'd made a second slight adjustment as the white was a little too bright for me, but I think it should be ok.

White text on a pink background ... oh boy, though the ones that really hurt me tend to involve yellow on black, and a squirly typeface.

[eqe.livejournal.com]

FWIW - I had this problem until I checked "View comment pages in your journal style?" on the editinfo page. Now when I click on "view comments", it always shows up in my journal style.

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

But I like seeing other people's journal styles most of the time, so I don't want to do that. Or am I misunderstanding how it works? Anyhow, I think I'll try ladyjillian's trick of highlighting for the unreadable ones.

[maureenkspeller.livejournal.com]

I normally do that ... it's when I take longer excursions into other people's journals that the terrible reality strikes home.

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

No, no, your journal was never a problem. At least not for me. I can't even remember what it was now, but it wasn't a problem. Was it light/dark grey? There's someone's page that I've stumbled across occasionally that uses light and dark shades of medium grey, i.e., not nearly enough contrast -- that's what I was thinking of. So sorry you thought I meant you.

[maureenkspeller.livejournal.com]

It was black on lightish grey ... when I took on that style, the first thing I did was to alter the font colour, which was originally dark grey, I think, but not very readable.

To be honest, having titivated my journal last night, and then reverted this morning, I've gone back to the titivation, because I suddenly realised my journal looked so, so sombre, and I didn't like it, whereas the lighter page looked much nicer. Consider it as having done me a favour by prompting me to make a few changes around here.

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

In that case, you're welcome. (And it looks lovely, btw.)

My apologies to you both!

[cynthia1960.livejournal.com]

Mea culpa! I'm trying to find out how I can change the text color for the comments. Got any advice?

Re: My apologies to you both!

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

Perceptive of you. And happily, Cynthia has now fixed it. Yay!

[ladyjillian.livejournal.com]

I've noticed that sometimes when I can't read people's pages (or website pages) I can highlight all the text, then I can see it against the highlighted background.

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

Ah, I'll remember that trick.

[idahoswede.livejournal.com]

Hear, hear, I really have problems with the pale blue type on a pale green background.

Singing, AMEN!

[rutemple.livejournal.com]

There are two folks on my flist that do this, who I generally like well enough to follow up on at least occasionally - I'll dump comments into a nice black and white page in TextEdit, and draft my response the same way. But it's gotta be worth the extra effort...

what's frightening is these folks are arts folk who ought to KNOW the impact and effect of color contrast.
*gurgle*

hugs to you n Mike

Re: Singing, AMEN!

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

*gack*

Think you'll ever tell them explicitly you find it unreadable? I'm beginning to think I might mention it on occasion, in as mild and inoffensive way I can manage.

Art people don't necessarily make good text choices -- different parts of the brain. Also, and this just occurred to me, they may not read their journal pages themselves. The comments are e-mailed, so they can just compose, read, and respond without ever dealing with reading in their journal style. Hmmm.

[alces2.livejournal.com]

Yes, I do not understand why people do that. I have seen the same on a number of web pages. Now admittedly I occasionally use some ugly colors in some people's eyes but the text can be read. At least I think it can. That is there is sufficient contrast between the two colors to make it legible. Another problem is that my eyes simply do not seem to function as well as they used to and some pages have print so small that it becomes almost impossible to read at times. Guess I'll have to start adding a magnifying glass to the things on my desk. I know that sometimes I can adjust the font size in the options of my browser but that does not always seem to work. I have seen some software that will also supposedly magnify pages but I can't put it on my machine at work. Of course, there's also other software that will read what is on the page to you. That could be a rather slow process though.

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

Oh, our aging eyes. I now need brighter light to read phone books than I used to. Although my eye doctor pointed out that taking off my glasses is equivalent to magnifying close text, and I'm astonished at the things I can read that way.

[sambushell.livejournal.com]

Agreed.