Despite praising high contrast, this site hypocritically throws away contrast for no good reason. I can understand using non-white backgrounds, because it can reduce glare, but using grey text is pure fashion. This site uses color:#191919 text. As always, the only good solution is user CSS to set it to #000000. I use the Stylish addon for Firefox to let me toggle this quickly for sites with light or dark color schemes.
There's no chance of too much contrast on an LCD displaying dark text on a light background. People have no trouble reading high quality print in sunlight, and that has much higher contrast. Grey text is harder to read, as demonstrated by the studies cited. Eg. this one finds pure 100% black on 100% white is most legible:
http://www.laurenscharff.com/research/agecontrast.html
Black text is the default, and changing it to grey only makes things worse. This is superior web design to the vast majority of sites out there:
http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
But note that excessive contrast can harm legibility of light text on dark background (although that color scheme is less legible, so it should be reserved for cases where it has real benefits, eg. photo editing software, where it makes it easier to see shadow detail).
The medium-high contrast setting they compared with would be equivalent of #444444, much brighter than the #191919 used by the website. I find it impossible to read a book in direct sunlight, and am pretty sure it's not just me.
Yea, but they also help with better color rendition, finer details and deeper blacks.The "anti-glare" technology used on non glossy screens is basically reducing their optical capabilities...
