Text is very hard to read

[BrianHicks]

I hope this is just my browser, but all the text on the site is very hard to read. The contrast is low enough that I really have to strain to pick it up and I have good vision and am reading on a large, bright monitor. This has to be even more difficult for folks not as fortunate as I am.

Chrome 57.0.2987, OS X 10.11 (El Capitan), retina mac screen (effectively 3350x2100px).

[takluyver]

Here it is on my Linux laptop (1920x1080):

That's definitely better than in your screenshot, and I find it OK to read, but we definitely should be conscious of people with visual impairments, especially if they also have super high res screens like yours ;-).

I think the fallback font it uses before the webfont loads is actually clearer - it looks like the glyphs are thicker. I've heard before that thin glyphs and low contrast colours are an unfortunate design trend. So maybe one easy improvement is to sacrifice a bit of modern style and use the default sans font.

I'm not much of a designer - do you know what's the best way to improve this? Thicker font? Different text colour/background colour? All the above? One trick I've seen used to increase contrast is to put black text over a partially transparent white strip, so the background colour is lighter behind the text.

@Carreau you've done more of the website design than me. If I do end up adjusting design, I may trample all over your beautiful aesthetics, so you might want to have a go before I do. 😛

[Carreau]

I think just making it bold should be enough. I had difficulty to read it in some screens.

[Carreau]

See #75

[Carreau]

How does it looks now (will take a few minutes to rebuild)

[takluyver]

I'm on a different computer from when I checked before (monitor 1680x1050), but it doesn't look substantially better to me. @BrianHicks can you check?

[BrianHicks]

It's improved for me on most text; the links in "why switch to Python 3" are still using the very thinnest stroke.

Can I make a suggestion? Raleway is super but it's definitely designed as a header font. If it were up to me, I'd pair it with Roboto, Droid Sans, or Source Sans. If you want something from the same foundry, try League Spartan (but it might be a little too thick!)

[takluyver]

I have no objections to changing the font - you sound like you know more about this matter than I do. @Carreau ?

[takluyver]

@Carreau I'm looking again at this, and your change in #75 actually makes the font thinner for me, not bolder. Here it is as it is at present:

And here it is if I use the CSS inspector to turn off the rule p {font-weight: 300}:

The default font weight for me appears to be 400.

It also doesn't affect the links at all, as @BrianHicks noticed, because they're not in <p> tags.

Feel free to propose more changes before I go in and mess around with the fonts, because there's a high chance of it looking ugly if it's up to me.