I have found myself in my own private war against web sites over text viewability. Gievn that I am a longtime-coder, and longtime-electronics engineer, I had a life-altering experience a few years ago: as I was laying out a new circuit board design via CAD for a longtime client, a board which I would also have to write all the code for, my eyesight went all-goofy <technical term?>. I had to depend on family members to get me an emergency admission to an eye clinic, where I learned I had a detached-retina in one eye, was told it must hurt, and they didn't have anyone on-staff that could fix it. A few years later, and I have my vision blocked in that same eye due to a cataract, they won't do surgery becuase I'm 'allergic to lasers' and I need to shift to audio books. Huh. No, here's what I need from web pages and web browsers: an end to de-emphasised background comments that appear as light-gray on white background, and a quick button that let's me view everything in undecorated font Libre Sans (Libre mono for code), Boldface, and 14-pixel. The boldface is a huge sticking point, and I really need it. And nobody supports it :(
My eyesight is like viewing everything through a 'snowstorm whiteout'. The thin strokes of non-Boldface are nearly invisible, and size-alone doesn't quite fix it enough. Then there are the web site that insist on havign a hard-lock on low-contrasty themes......they seem to feel their precious theme to be more important than the word.
In your browser of choice, install the "Stylus" plugin. This is a plugin that will let you write custom CSS styles for any and all page(s). If your browser of choice does not have the exact "Stylus" plugin it will have a plugin of another (similar) name that will do the identical task.
As it seems from your post that you may not be extremely familiar with CSS, here is a ruleset that will do something close to what you wish. Font is set to 26px, not 14. You can easily change that.
Make it valid for "Everything" and it will be valid for everything but those sites that are extremely convoluted.
Websites should be designed better, but it is 2024, that ship has sailed I think.
The Dark Reader addon for Firefox is somewhat poorly named, it seems to be a pretty solid overall website customization tool. It can, for example:
* force websites into light mode
* change backgrounds to plain white and text to plain black
* apply tints in general
* force font line width changes.
Might be worth a glance. I have pretty good vision but I just use it because the way the internet is supposed to work is: send me text, I’ll render it however I want. This lets me ignore more meddling by designers.
I've been asking myself what I want out of visiting particular sites and what I need to get it. How far do I need to move from the command line to fulfill my goal?
At the browser level I've found myself wanting to reorganize layout quite a bit, and am starting to think about templating from a user perspective beyond light/dark theme. What assumptions am I making about intent in my work? How can I provide flexibility and when should I step back and just link a csv dump?
I think my ideal modern browser looks more like a crawler. Display of info loosely coupled to site content. All of the scripts I'd actually want to run pulled down on my side from public repos.
If you're on Mac, I recommend the Arc Browser, and using their Boost to adjust sites with custom css with the font + bold specification you want. Or a chrome extension, but I'm sure you've already found a similar solution and it's annoying to just have to re-do that everytime.
I wonder if there are custom CSS chrome extensions that allow you to apply a font to all sites not just one.
