Horrible, horrible font for help-texts. What were you thinking?

[it_vegard]

Enonic version: XP 6.7.0-RC5
OS: Windows

Hi,

I just downloaded the 6.7.0-RC5 version to test my formbuilder app before finishing up the last parts before uploading new version. And then I saw the help-text fonts…

Rarely have I had such a strong reaction to a font (though there are exceptions). Just please, please, please change it! It is aweful. Just horrible. I struggle reading what is there, and it looks like a five year old played around with Word on Windows 95. You could have gone with WordArt and it would not have made a difference.

I somehow hope this is an internal joke, and you planned to change this before releasing the stable version 6.7.0, because I can not see any sane reason for leaving the sensible, clean and professional look of the rest of the site for this single, little feature. I think I noticed the look of it before, and I don’t know if it changed since early 6.7.0-SNAPSHOTs, but I kind of expected it to be changed by now…

Also, you might want to darken the font a little. The color contrast does not currently validate against WCAG 2.0. (Tested using Chrome Web Developer > Audits > Accessibility) Though there are multiple places with this problem, this particular feature, combined with the font makes it very difficult to read if you have anything less than a 20/20 eyesight.

My recommendation is to use the same font you use for regular text everywhere else in XP, and darken the color a little. It is okay to want to make it clear this is just a help-text, but do that with an icon or something else. Don’t make it less readable…

Finally: Sorry for venting on this, but I really feel that font deserves such a reaction…

[tsi]

There have been strong internal discussions about it too. The “designer” might have been blinded by how this looks on a retina screen

Let’s see what happens…

NB! We will also be providing a show/hide help text feature in an upcoming release.

[lassejl]

100% agree with Vegard. Worst. Font. Ever. Even worse than Comic Sans MS.

[lassejl]

Even on retina it looks horrible and cartoonish.

[Magnus]

I’m not sure retina screens and designers are valid excuses for ignoring WCAG and common sense…

[jsi]

RC6:

[tsi]

In regards to WCAG - are you talking about the font color?

[Magnus]

Font color is a bit small. Contrast is the word I’d use since the contrast depends on the background color as well. Not everyone has 20/20 eyesight or even well calibrated monitors with a proper color space. Even though it might not be part of WCAG standards legibility is important in font choices, and it’s important to remember that not everyone sits with HiDPI displays (what Apple calls “Retina”).

In terms of common sense I mean that it looks horrible and has low legibility, but at least that seems to have been fixed in RC6.

[tlo]

The color contrast is still not passing WCAG AA (currently 2.27:1), but the font change is at least a huge improvement on readability, even on retina screens.
I believe all our developers are interested in feedback on things like this, so thanks for posting this “bug report”.