Perishable Press

2 • April 9, 2008 at 9:34 am — Perishable says:

Thanks for the feedback, Maggie. I hear you about the readability issue, and will be taking steps to improve the situation while redesigning the site here within the next couple of months. In the meantime, after the default theme is restored (for today, the CSS styles have been disabled), you can always click on the small sun icon in the lower-right corner of the screen to “lighten things up” a bit. I hope that helps!
Kind regards,
Jeff

4 • April 28, 2008 at 7:33 am — Perishable says:

Thank you for the feedback, contrastblind. I hear your concerns and assure you that I am working diligently on a new default theme for the site. Lord willing, the new design will feature strongly contrasted text and nice, big font sizes. In the meantime, there are several options for users who may have trouble reading the contents of this site or any other:

- disable stylesheets in your browser
- use a JavaScript bookmark to toggle the CSS styles of problematic pages
- highlight the text using Ctrl+A

..and specifically for this site:

- use the sun icon that you now know about to brighten things up a bit
- select an alternate theme (currently more than 16 available)

Frankly, although I have compassion for people who may have difficulty browsing low-contrast sites, I am surprised at the apparent lack of knowledge concerning these alternate solutions. Surely, many fine webmasters and designers are bending over backwards these days to produce sites that are usable by the largest common denominator. I have experienced countless situations in which inspiring and creative designs were simply scrapped in the name of usability. I feel that usability is everyone’s responsibility, not just the designer’s. When such responsibility is placed entirely on designers, users tend to take their efforts for granted, get complacent, and assume an apathetically privileged attitude, as seen in quotes such as this:

Too bad, I’m sure there’s lots of interesting stuff hiding in there.

In my humble opinion, such attitudes are counterproductive. Sure, let’s just give up on a site and all of its information simply because it might be necessary to click an extra button or two.