Judging by the position of my comment in the thread, it is not clear that everyone shares your view of it being merely thread pollution. I wasn't really mad, that comment was a play on this joke, which is fairly well known on the net: http://1389blog.com/pix/im-so-angry-i-made-a-sign.jpg So what should I do, be mr serious and drone on like a broken record about accessibility? Is it so bad that I try to address the point in a whimsical way? If you think that telling someone to make a minor change to their text styles is harsh, read more comments here. It's not uncommon to see someone's entire business model questioned and torn apart in the comments; if the worst complaint is about text color, that's a good day! :)
One thing you said does, in fact, really irritate me: "I can read them pretty nicely on my computer." This is not the standard by which accessibility is judged!! It doesn't matter if you can read fine in 7px grey on gray, that doesn't make it accessible.
I'm not just pulling this stuff out of thin air, by the way. http://www.accesskeys.org/tools/color-contrast.html These are widely accepted best practices, and you should follow them if you care about people with abilities different than your own being able to use your site.
Agreed: my comment should not be the top comment; it's just one small critique. I just see this so frequently (low low contrast, hard to read text) as well as other accessibility issues on sites linked from hn that I started griping about it. FWIW I don't just gripe about it, sometimes I actually do something: https://github.com/addyosmani/todomvc/pull/37 :)
In the end I think it's important to remember that even if the content is the best thing in the world, that doesn't mean much if people can't read it. I'm probably just a curmudgeon but I've clicked links to posts where I saw the contrast and size and said "I'm not going to bother reading this. It is too hard and I don't care enough about this article to change my browser settings to correct the designer's mistakes." And many people don't have the skills to do so. Three cheers for agreement! :)
One thing you said does, in fact, really irritate me: "I can read them pretty nicely on my computer." This is not the standard by which accessibility is judged!! It doesn't matter if you can read fine in 7px grey on gray, that doesn't make it accessible.
I'm not just pulling this stuff out of thin air, by the way. http://www.accesskeys.org/tools/color-contrast.html These are widely accepted best practices, and you should follow them if you care about people with abilities different than your own being able to use your site.