Great pointer! Thanks for that!

SeattleC++ wrote:

Teeny tiny fonts and low contrast are the natural result of equipping 25-year-old developers with gigantic monitors. They should have to program on their phones.

ROFL! Couldn't agree more! But wait!--- maybe the "designers" are all in cahoots with the display mfgrs to force everyone to buy bigger monitors!! :)

SeattleC++ wrote:

Pitchforks and torches ready! Storm the Corporate towers! Death to designers!

HAHAHA! I'm sure you're on somebody's watch-list now! :laugh:

Yvan Rodrigues wrote:

trying to convince people in a company where everyone is in their 20s that there is a problem is challenging. I think eventually, especially now that baby boomers are getting old,

What's needed in our industry is basic market research and beta testing: study the demographics, match with the target audience, and do live product surveys! If you had 100 people in a room testing your app, and 20% of them said "I can't read this!", that would be Hugely (Bigly, even!) unacceptable. With the boomer population trending the way it is, you'll see higher numbers than that!

Thanks for that! I didn't know about that one... I'll monkey with it; perhaps it approaches the CSS doinking that I was talking about! :)

Eddy Vluggen wrote:

Weird enough, the best readability is white on blue.

I think you've hit on an example of why designers/developers get it wrong! The "normal" tendency in this context is to ask questions like "how's the best readability achieved?", with the end result being a myriad of opinions. But, it's my belief that there's NO "one size fits all" solution: I'm partially color-blind, and have glaucoma, and find yellow-on-maroon to be the most readable for ME. It's truly a Personal Preference issue that should be user-accessible, admittedly with reasonable defaults, but not constrained by design/dev/os/browser.

So, as a disclaimer, I'll admit that my vision isn't what it was when I was 20-something. (Duh!) But, all of you UI/UX architects/designers/developers (and paying Clients of those folks!) please hear me out: I'm going to start with a simple example of what is a) very common, and b) crappy design. I went to the website of a well-known medical services provider, whose identity will remain undisclosed, using their otherwise very-well-designed IOS app. I browsed to some of my own relevant patient history information, and was presented with a page of very tiny font, expressed in a light blue on white background - TOTALLY UNREADABLE! And to add insult to injury, there was no ability to ZOOM the page content!! What CRAP! Of course, I've sent a complaint to the appropriate "customer service" people; I don't expect anything to change anytime soon, so for now, I use a desktop browser to access the info. But it occurs to me that the one basic readability issue still exists: light blue on white! "Turn on high-contrast mode" you say... uh huh, ask anyone who's putzed with that for any length of time how well that works! BLECH! What we need is some recognition that visual contrast is IMPORTANT for avoiding fatigue, and that being CUTE with fonts and color schemes is doing your customer a disservice! Knock it off! And a suggestion for BROWSER designers/devs: I want a browser-level feature to allow me to specify a HARD OVERRIDE of font and background parameters in any webpage's CSS that I access. We need to provide user-level control over visual accessibility. Ya, I know this is a challenge - I'm a developer too. But we need to pay attention to making whatever it is we're presenting, readable and useful.

Easy test to see if a # is "prime": it's served with hollandaise sauce! Otherwise it's "choice"!

(I posted this comment on HackerNews as well): IMHO, publishing an article describing the existence of an OS or App flaw is possibly (I say that cautiously) a legitimate thing to do. But to not only describe the flaw in explicit detail, but to demonstrate how to exploit it, is irresponsible. What's next? A bunch of hackers thrashing about trying to make hay with this information before the hole is plugged in who-knows-how-many targets? I think more responsibility ought to be placed on those who disseminate this kind of information, in cases where it ends up causing harm of any kind.

I'm the Chief Bit-Byte-Blob Combobulator in my company (of one :) Technically, a "Software Engineer" might not do any actual "Programming" - maybe just designing/architecting. So I don't think it's always an equivalency. $0.02