color scheme problematic

posted on June 7th, 2012, 3:44 am

Tested on several mobile devices, with and without glare:
lowered screen brightness, which is common for notebooks and tablets if you're running on battery, if you're not stationary, or just in dark places / at night, results in a nearly unreadable web page - i refer to the grey on grey (especially in forums!)


> Another choosable scheme might be nice, or no grey on grey (meh).

posted on June 7th, 2012, 6:41 am

Maybe users could customize site to some degree? certainly choose font color, I don't find too much difficulty reading posts although I could see how that could the an issue. The contrast when you write a post though I find works well.

posted on June 7th, 2012, 8:29 am

we will also supply a dedicated mobile version of the site somewhere in the future

posted on June 7th, 2012, 11:36 am

It should be possible to force your web browser to disable the ability of any site to fiddle with font, in firefox go to:
Options -> Content -> Colours then uncheck the box at the bottom allowing sites to set their own colours.

problem with that is I think it murders all CSS, resulting in pages looking very simple, like made-for-half-blind-people simple.

There's a couple firefox addons that might help:
No color which allows you to click to remove font colours and backgrounds on a single page by clicking

and:

Color Transform which has many many settings, one of which is white on black, which makes the text readable again. I only played around with it for a minute, so it may have even easier to read settings.

Of course this doesn't work for mobile browsers. It's possible your mobile browser has addons, I know Dolphin HD does, it may not have the addon for this though.

posted on June 7th, 2012, 3:10 pm

Yes, I agree the colors are a bit hard, very low contrast.

I'll also add that the "new/unread" topic color is very close to the "read" color so it's hard to tell the difference (yeah, I know there's the little blue corner, but it's not very noticable). Maybe using red again for unread would work.

posted on June 7th, 2012, 6:00 pm

It should be possible to force your web browser to disable the ability of any site to fiddle with font, in firefox go to...

Of course there are plenty of work arounds, but this color scheme is a problem in general.
It even starts to annoy me a lot with a shiny and very bright LED display.
I could start to change the whole behavior of my browser, or install FF with plugins to get this done, but i doubt the majority would do it.

Don't get me wrong here, it looks shiny, but it's way too hard to read - and reading (/writing) is obviously the purpose of a forum?

we will also supply a dedicated mobile version of the site somewhere in the future

At least on netbooks and 10 inch tablets the site looks like it should look. Quite fancy, except the grey on grey with low brightness.



Edit: tested a bit around, a more white'ish grey would do the trick, or as mentioned: customizeable color schemes.

posted on June 7th, 2012, 6:51 pm

personally i find this much easier on the eyes. tho i find it also give me a ghosting effect after reading it i can see the text still when looking elsewhere (like those eye trick things if that makes sense)

posted on June 8th, 2012, 2:40 am

personally i find this much easier on the eyes. ..

Yup, it's nice if you read on a bright stationary display.

No bitching intended, just stating some problems with less bright devices. Anyways, i'm sure sooner or later there will be some setting

posted on June 9th, 2012, 6:11 pm

A lighter grey is a good idea.

Like about this color would be good I think.

posted on June 9th, 2012, 9:08 pm

Good suggestion Nebula..

posted on June 9th, 2012, 9:23 pm

yeah i like this colour, too.

posted on June 9th, 2012, 9:37 pm

oh guys

the goal of the site redo we worked hard on was to have a smooth and clean forum, not a circus of colors.

I will take a look at your issue.

posted on June 9th, 2012, 9:42 pm

Well, to be precise: grey isn't really a color.

The Design itself is totally awesome Optec, for us it's just about read-ability, not about design or whatsoever.
Not sure about the other two, but for me the function weights more than the design.

And come on, which circus? Nebula just suggested a slightly lighter grey.

posted on June 9th, 2012, 10:02 pm

and here we go

posted on June 9th, 2012, 10:36 pm

personally i prefer the new forum standard to the brighter version you guys are using.. perhaps we could be able to adjust it to our own preference? would be nice if possible.