Only read this today, but I completely agree.
Ryan Kaldari wrote:
I've noticed that the majority of designs I've seen from the design team in the past year have featured light grey text (frequently #CCCCCC) on a white background. Although I understand the need to make non-essential text less prominent, having text that is barely or not at all readable to a large percentage of the population seems like a bad idea. One of the main differences between designing for Wikipedia and designing for other sites is that Wikipedia strongly values accessibility. I know that the design team is very conscious of color-blindness in its designs, but poor vision in general is a much more common problem and should arguably be given more consideration than color-blindness.
Personally, I would suggest that we avoid using light grey on white text or grey on grey text and try to maintain a minimum level of text contrast. If that doesn't seem realistic, I would at least like to see us avoid low-contrast text at small font sizes. What are other people's thoughts on this?
Ryan Kaldari