Hello! I think it would be better to make the font color darker. It’s difficult to read the names of threads (when there are many of them), their descriptions, and a light gray color, which appears after the first visit to the thread, even more uncomfortable. And as for already visited threads, maybe it would be more convenient to use a small colorful symbol near the thread’s name…
3 Likes
You can switch to a darker color scheme in Preference - Interface - Theme and select “Postcrossing (darker)”, which should improve the readability.
1 Like
@SkyHound thank you for your advice! But I’m not fond of dark and night themes. I prefer to read black letters on white pages or something like that x)
Then may I suggest you try the official High Contrast Chrome extension and select the increase contrast mode.
It may distort the color somewhat but it would make the text become black-on-white.
2 Likes
Thanks for opening the topic as I suggested.
Colors are a tricky thing to get right — it’s the sort of thing that’s nearly impossible to please everyone at once. But if this is something that affects many people, we may take a look.
Just so that I can be sure I understand: your main point is with the light color used on the already read/visited topics, correct? Or you also mean the color used on the unread ones?
You also included a screenshot of the homepage of the forum. Do you also suggest changing the colors of the sub-categories listed in there? Or just of the list of topics pages?
That would be nice, but I’m not aware of any built-in way to do this. But we can tweak the colors if this affects more people.
Thanks! It seems that it makes all pages like that, not only the forum. But I’ll have a look! c:
I know that very well because I worked with fonts and colors and the impossibility to please everyone at once. So, if it’s only a problem of mine I’ll understand and will look for a way to fix it for me myself. But maybe there are people who face the same problem. The forum just moved, so I decided that it would be better to ask about it.
I spoke about both, yes. The main point was the color of topics on the Categories page:
And the descriptions of threads:
First of all, I use here the font size “larger” because of my eyesight. But it’s still inconvenient to read small light grey fonts like in the first picture when there are a lot of words/topics or long light grey descriptions like in the second one. They are lighter than those (news, profile description) on the main Postcrossing site (I checked it). They go well when there isn’t a lot of text (buttons, dates and time, number of replies, etc).
As for already visited/read topics, it’s also a problem. It’s a really cool idea to show that a topic was already visited! It helps to find it easily if a person forgot or didn’t make a bookmark, or not to open if there was nothing interesting for a person. But when there are lots of visited topics + they have descriptions + a person is very active in one category and read most of the topics it becomes inconvenient to read their names. As for the decision of that problem, I suggest to make the font darker or to use small colorful symbols to show that a topic was visited.
I hope I explained everything well and wasn’t rough 
P.S. Is it a norm that an image needs time to load after a new post is created? When I publish a post with images, they do not open immediately (there is no possibility to zoom in, no matter how much I click on the image), there is no signature with the name and size, you have to refresh the page a couple of times and/or in total wait for about half a minute. Then, everything starts to work as it should. This is not a problem, just a question.
2 Likes
I would have to agree with @EugeneOnegin. On the white background, the colored dots with a lot of gray text, makes the gray text fade to the background and the green dots (or other colored dots) ‘pop.’ Also, in the screenshot with the long gray sentences for topics, the gray makes the words blend together more and makes it harder to read (for me anyway.) Would it help you if the lines separating the categories/topics were darker or more defined?
I switched to the dark version to compensate for that, though. It doesn’t completely take away from it, but it helps. But for those who don’t like the dark background, I can understand the frustration to read the topics and descriptions.
1 Like
Thank you for sending more details — that’s helpful for us to understand where are the main issues are.
For some context, the layout and style being used here are a light customization of the Discourse default theme just so that it is closer to the Postcrossing style. But we haven’t touched on the fonts, text size or color (except on the Darker theme of course). This is not to say that they are good or that that they shouldn’t be changed — just that we didn’t choose those specifically as they are still the default.
I agree that there’s room for improvement with some gray shades, in particular with the read/unread topics and on the category lists on the homepage.
I did some research today on this, and found that this forum software (Discourse) has actually already implemented some changes regarding colors that will be released on upcoming versions, namely,
- ADA / WCAG compliant contrast theme shipping by default (planned)
- Improved Dark Mode support (implemented)
- User selectable color palettes (implemented)
This means that the next time we upgrade, we should get at least some of these changes.
It’s quite possible that some of these contrast issues will already be improve by these, but even if not, we are likely going to need to update our customs themes to adjust to the changes, so we’ll look into addressing the issues reported here at that point (together with a few other things we have been taking notes of). There’s no exact date for the next version to be released, but expect it be in next weeks/few months.
In the meantime, if there are other issues related text color contrast, please continue reporting it here.
2 Likes
Thank you for explaining it! I didn’t know that before. So, I understand better now why it’s like that. And, by the way, I am 500% sure that you would not have made such light fonts yourself if the site had been made personally by you from scratch x) I remember all variants of fonts sizes and colors on the main site :'D
Well, let’s wait for the updations and see what will be there with fonts. And thank you a lot for your research! 
1 Like