Sometimes words leap out at me

[andrewducker]

[Poll #1778459]

Comments

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Yes, back in the days when sites used shitty colour schemes and selecting it made that better. Haven't felt the need in a long time though. I do sometimes up the font size on a page though.

[cosmolinguist]

I have exactly the kind of visual impairment this sort of thing helps with.

[andrewducker]

You'll notice that the theme on my page has...odd colour schemes. That's because I find black on white hard to read. Lowering the contrast makes it much easier for me. Failing that, white on blue is better than black on white for me.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Sometimes, but not on lj, where I read everything in my own style.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

But generally only when scrolling a long page of text so I keep track of where I'd got to.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Same here - if the text is dark grey on navy blue or something similarly horrid, then I'll select it, but this has thankfully gotten rarer and so I haven't done this in years.

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

The one I can't stand is white on black - gives me lines in front of my eyes every time :(

[tysolna]

Yes, but only when the text is hard to read / the formatting is crap.

*visions of old Geocities pages with dark blue font on back / starry background, animated gifs and background music running through my mind* Ah, the early '90s... I had a page on RodeoDrive, but I never ever made style errors like that. :D

[skington.livejournal.com]

I nearly always up the font size, sometimes a couple of notches. Not because I have bad eyesight, but because I use a 17" laptop with a high-resolution screen, with an external keyboard much of the time, so stuff is effectively shrunk for me.

Also, bumping up the zoom usually means that the entire page zooms; on sites which have annoying sidebars full of ads and/or related stories I don't care about, that has the useful side-effect of bumping them off-screen out of the way.

Safari also has the useful Reader mode, which shows just text, and inline images, and stitches together pages artificially divided into multiple web pages for added pageview goodness - screenshots here. It's based on the open source Readability, so I imagine there are Firefox and/or Chrome plugins.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

I miss the old-fashioned zoom that increased text size but kept images the same. I feel that's truer to the way the web is meant to be consumed; this full-page zoom is browsers just showing off really.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Its really rare these days -- if a website has such a messed up colour scheme I need to do this I'll generally just cut and paste to somewhere else.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

Ditto.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

I equate this to reading someone on paper and having your fingertip running along the bit which you're reading.

[miramon.livejournal.com]

Yes, but normally I just zap the formatting with a bookmarklet

[andrewducker]

Oooh. I've been using ReadItLater to get the same effect as Readability (on mobile) - I hadn't encountered Readability itself before. Now installed. Thanks!

[desperance.livejournal.com]

My 'no' vote actually means 'never yet', because I never thought of it, because I am dim. But I am now also at that age where I no longer try to read white-on-black text, because it makes my eyes weird. I'll try selecting. Thanks!

[cheekbones3.livejournal.com]

Only when it's black on black usually.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

As with others I do it when the colour scheme is stupid. Also, for the record, my own LJ is not black on white but black on #fafafa, which I find makes all the difference.

[flickgc.livejournal.com]

Only if it's badly formatted.

I have an LJ bookmarklet!

[cyprinella]

Much less often though after getting the style=mine bookmarklet and the one from Readability.

[redshira.livejournal.com]

Sometimes, if I'm reading something long, I'll just change the colours of everything to dark grey on light grey, which saves faff and avoids the contrast problem which highlighting doesn't help. But then I've always got some level of migraine and my eyes are very finicky about light and contrast and saturation.

[kerrypolka.livejournal.com]

Me too.

[hawkida.livejournal.com]

No, but I select bits to "bookmark" where I got to in them as I look away, or switch to and from tabs.

[ipslore.livejournal.com]

I'll highlight text if it's been spoiler-redacted, and I'll highlight text in a tiny font size, so that I can C&P it into Notepad. Does that count?

[dougs.livejournal.com]

... when a poster has over-ridden my friends-page style, resulting in text and background in the same colour.

[0olong.livejournal.com]

I said yes because I don't think it's that long since I came across such stupid decisions.

[matgb]

This-especially common in full feed Blogger posts, I assume they've done something even more stupid to their RTE.