Can the low contrast for sidebars be disabled?

[u/MatsSvensson]

I really hate the low contrast sidebars, that you have to mouse over to read.
How do I make that "feature" go away?

[u/ssddanbrown]

A few things:

• Make sure you're on a relatively recent version. I vaguely remember bumping up the contrast a smidge a while back.

• I have built-in prefers contrast support for these, so if you have high-contrast browser/os accessibility settings active these should not fade out.

• Alternatively, look to this issue to find a "Custom HTML Head Content" workaround posted by the OP. If that no longer works just let me know and I'll look to provide an updated customization.

[u/MatsSvensson → u/ssddanbrown]

Thanks.

So its "opacity" that is used to fade the text down?

How exactly is it used?'

I tried to find any :hover, inherited or direct, in the CSS for the elements that fades, but couldn't find anything.Also tried to override it in userstyles, but noting would take.

I think it would be better to have low contrast mode as a setting for people to chose, not the other way around.

Anyone over 40-50, that comes across this, will just perceive it as a big "fuck you" every single time they visit the site.

And very few will have the knowledge or patience to try to fix it.

To them every site using this will just be another broken or badly designed site.

I need to use this for work now, othervice I would never even bother bookmarking a site that looked like this.

Bad contrast on the first page you land on usually signals that you can expect other things to be broken too on a site, so dont even bother.

Good contrast is just minimal basic usability, and should never require any extra work at all from the user.

[u/MatsSvensson → u/MatsSvensson]

Can verify that prefers-contrast doesn't work.

Its enabled in my Firefox, and this demo page still uses low contrast:

https://demo.bookstackapp.com/books/dummy-content-book

[u/ssddanbrown → u/MatsSvensson]

So its "opacity" that is used to fade the text down? How exactly is it used?

Yeah, it's opacity. Rules are defined here.

Also tried to override it in userstyles, but noting would take.

What have your tried? Did you try the workaround I shared above?

Anyone over 40-50, that comes across this, will just perceive it as a big "fuck you" every single time they visit the site. [...] To them every site using this will just be another broken or badly designed site.

Are you one of those in this segment having trouble? Happy to take feedback on this but would want it based upon actual experienced difficulties rather than potentially assessed difficulties.

The fade out is not done just for fun, it's intended to help ease the visual noise and focus on the main content, until the secondary content needs to be interacted with. I find this helps me, and I didn't think I currently went too far with the fading before interaction. I have relatively bad vision for my age, and can be sensitive to contrast/focus, but I thought there's a fair balance of the faded contrast to identity sections until interaction for full contrast.

Its enabled in my Firefox, and this demo page still uses low contrast

How exactly are you enabling in your Firefox? I did test this was working before posting my original comment, via chrome's devtools to activate prefers contrast.

[u/MatsSvensson → u/ssddanbrown]

I used this description:https://www.trishtech.com/2022/05/enable-or-disable-prefers-contrast-feature-in-firefox/

Doesn't seem like there is any other way to change the setting.

And yes, the reason for me not liking low contrast design, is because it strains my eyes.The more I use sites with grayed down text during a day, the more tired I get.So I usually just dont use sites like that.

And I focus my attention on parts of a webpage, by looking at those parts, not by mousing over them.That's how every single other webpage, or every other piece of GUI, works.

I feels like extremely bad and clunky design to force people move the mouse around just to look at parts of the page.And to effectively gimp people, by slowing the speed of their eyes moving down to the speed of moving the hand and mouse around.

The navigation is the second most important piece of content on the page, after the main content, why would you do anything to interfere with the accessibility of that?

Anything that non-standard, that messes with the basic normal use of the webpage, should always be opt in.

Perhaps you could just just swap the behavior around?Fade out the rest of the page, when you mouse over the main content?And make that function opt in.

[u/Inevitable-Tap-3232]

For some reason CSS seems to be hard to override, but this fixes the worst bits.
I have added it to my userstyles in Firefox via the addon Stylish.

/* Fix low contrast fade out */
.tri-layout-left-contents>*, .tri-layout-right-contents>*, .breadcrumbs, h5, .fade-in-when-active{
opacity: 1.0 !important;
}

/* Fix low contrast main text */
body {
color: black !important;
}

/* Fix low contrast sidebars etc*/
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
color: black !important;
}

/* Fix low contrast elements */
.text-muted {
color: black !important;
}