> It’s not anyone’s job as a web designer to insist they're wrong.
But this goes both ways. I've seen developers complain about the W3C accessibility standards on contrast because it looks too severe on their retina display full-brightness Macbook.
But the relative cost of having too much contrast (it's uncomfortable to read, but still perfectly legible) and the relative ease of fixing it (turn down your laptop brightness) is very minor when compared against the many people with crappy, low-light displays that can't adjust their brightness or fix the problem of low contrast text.
Often what people mean when they say to optimize for what people have is that they'd prefer to optimize for the highest quality devices first. But for a nontrivial number of websites and demographics, those devices are the minority, and in those situations high-contrast black-on-white text will look better on a wider variety of the devices that ordinary people are using.
But this goes both ways. I've seen developers complain about the W3C accessibility standards on contrast because it looks too severe on their retina display full-brightness Macbook.
But the relative cost of having too much contrast (it's uncomfortable to read, but still perfectly legible) and the relative ease of fixing it (turn down your laptop brightness) is very minor when compared against the many people with crappy, low-light displays that can't adjust their brightness or fix the problem of low contrast text.
Often what people mean when they say to optimize for what people have is that they'd prefer to optimize for the highest quality devices first. But for a nontrivial number of websites and demographics, those devices are the minority, and in those situations high-contrast black-on-white text will look better on a wider variety of the devices that ordinary people are using.