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A lady at the DMV in Boise pointed at the form and said she could not read the gray text
I was waiting at the DMV in Boise last Tuesday and the lady next to me held up the paper form and said the light gray labels were too hard to see. It got me thinking about how forms and menus used to just be plain black on white, and now everything is soft gray on slightly lighter gray because it looks clean on a big screen. Does anyone else keep a printout of old black on white examples around just to show clients what actually works?
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emmar7520h ago
Read a thing from the Nielsen Norman Group about text contrast and it said light gray text on white fails basic readability for a big chunk of people, especially older folks or anyone in bad lighting. Their guideline is basically keep the contrast ratio high enough that it still reads in a dim room, and most of these trendy gray forms don't come close. I've seen the same issue at my pharmacy, the labels on the pill bottles are gray on white and my mom just hands them to me now. The DMV one is worse because you can't exactly ask a stranger to read your whole form out loud. Old black on white looks boring but boring is the whole point, it works.
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