Products · Pattern or everyday thing
Website typography
Raised as a usability problem by 26 people on Hacker News over 15 years (2012–2026), in 26 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Dark background, light text and small font are hard to readUnreviewed
20122026- Text is black on almost black background, so it's unreadable2026-10-26
- Font is so hard to read it causes eye pain after brief reading2026-09-15
- Font too thin, letters like e and A hard to read2025-08-01
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 26 complaints
- Text is black on almost black background, so it's unreadable2026-10-26
- Font is so hard to read it causes eye pain after brief reading2026-09-15
- Font too thin, letters like e and A hard to read2025-08-01
- Light grey skinny fonts on white make pages illegible to read2025-02-02
- Small thin serif text in dark gray is hard to read on ordinary screens2024-04-23
- Thin font tires eyes, even bold text is too thin to read comfortably2023-04-24
- Text is too small and low contrast, and user font and size overrides still break2022-02-27
- Article text renders unreadably small on a mobile phone2021-10-01
- Article is hard to read until reader mode is turned on2021-09-17
- Text is small, thin, light gray on white, hard to read2021-04-03
- Grey text on white or light-grey backgrounds is hard to read2021-02-25
- Page is very hard to read in Firefox due to white background with light pink text2021-02-17
- Light gray font on lighter gray background causes eye strain and hard reading2020-12-12
- Oversized heading wastes space above the fold on one word2020-09-12
- The site's font makes it almost unusable for reading2019-02-05
- Inconsistent font makes the text hard to read, forcing the reader to change it2017-05-14
- Grey text on black background is hard to read for older eyes2017-03-30
- The site's font is hard to read2015-10-07
- Link colors match body text, so users can't tell which words are links2015-09-21
- Background and text color combination makes the text difficult to read2014-11-03
- Font is hard for the reader's eyes to scan, making reading much slower2014-06-12
- Low-contrast grey text makes the commenter's eyes blur, so they can't read more than a sentence2014-01-02
- Dark background, light text and small font make the page hard to read2013-05-30
- Text is cramped and lines are too wide to scan comfortably2013-05-04
- Font is practically unreadable in Chrome on Windows for dyslexic reader2013-01-22
- Page looks broken while loading, so users reload thinking it is a rendering bug2012-12-21