When the printing press was invented, we had the understanding that text is best read when contrast is high. They didn’t use black ink on paper for nothing. I bet they didn’t even consider any other color.

Then came the mass legions of web designers, and these self-anointed experts of visual attractiveness keep no HTML element from their rightful aesthetic salvation, regardless of pragmatic considerations. In other words, do these designers even read? Or is everything just a shape with a color?

I was again confronted with this when reading the Mozilla site. It uses a white background, with text in the color “rgb(109, 117, 129)”. In other words, not even gray, but lighter than gray.

So, when you’re reading a privacy policy, which would you choose? This:

or this:

Time to install Blacken: “It seems to be fashionable these days to use faded text on many web sites. Some sites are so faded that they are unreadable. This extension will change the colour of grey text back to black so that it is easier to read.”