Jumping on a new trend is risky business, both in fashion and web design! Here is why trends often hurt the user experience and exclude users with disabilities. I’ll also go through what you can do to avoid this from happening.

Six red game pieces in a group. One black game piece on its own.

Trend #1: Bright and light

For a while now, it’s been considered modern to design things that are difficult to see. It’s a strange trend that’s causing problems for all sorts of users. Let me walk you through some troublesome bright and light trends out there.

Thin, small, grey font

Slim, tiny, grey letters are popping up in interfaces all over the web, forcing users to strain their eyes while reading. Companies like Squarespace are even winning awards for this kind of unsightly design:

Tiny, grey, font on Squarespace reading: "Award winning design"

Running this interface through the disability simulator Funkify, this is what the interface above looks like with blurry vision:

Blurry version of the previous image. Basically impossible to read.

Not very pleasant, right?

Nobody likes to strain their eyes when reading, but this trend is especially hurtful to some user groups:

Users with small devices
People who are outside in bright sunlight
Elderly users
People with low vision

When asked what causes accessibility problems on the web (our full article: Accessibility According to Actual Users with Disabilities), quite a few people brought up this topic:

Nearly blind in my left eye. Tiny, thin font with low contrast to the background

— Andrew So (@AndrewDixonSo) 3 juni 2017

I know what you’re thinking: It’s Apple’s fault!

Yes, Apple introduced a thin font in iOS a couple of years back and they used grey text color a lot in their designs. However, they made sure the grey had a sufficient contrast level (how to check color contrasts) and the thin font wasn’t measured in nanometers.

The problem was that when other designers jumped on this trend, they made the grey color brighter and the letters thinner. Suddenly the text was only readable by designers with 52 inch retina displays and predator birds.

That’s why it’s so nice to hear that Apple is ditching it’s thin, grey fonts. Here’s a comparison between the old and new phone interface:

iPhone dial, two versions. Left one with thin font, right one with bold font.

So Apple is moving away from the thin, grey trend. You should too.

Bright color schemes

Many users with disabilities struggle on the web because of contrast issues in trendy interfaces.

Lack of contrast between font color and background color. Photo backgrounds that overpower the text on top of them.

— Megan Lynch (@may_gun) 4 juni 2017

One common offender is white text on brightly colored backgrounds:

White text on light blue and yellow backgrounds.

The color contrasts between the text and backgrounds above are terrible and far below the