The Medium platform has a lot of good features going for it, yet it literally ignores visual accessibility. For a platform that is entirely based around readable content, one would think that it’d be close to State of the Art, instead of the State of Unreadable.
Press enter or click to view image in full size
Let me be very clear. The way Medium handles body text is bad for visual accessibility and can cause eye fatigue. And Medium doesn’t provide content creators with a way to correctly set text color, or turn off that faux antialiasing which harms readability contrast even more.
Medium also does not provide for the increasingly common, and desirable, user switchable dark/light modes. The real holy-grail of accessibility is user personalization. A light and dark mode that was user selectable, and also followed the user’s system preference, would be an important step toward personalization for visual accessibility.
Please Stop Using Grey Text
An article by this author that went somewhat viral last year lambasts the disturbing trend toward unreadable light-grey body text. This author is also on record as to how some of the problem stems from misunderstandings…