One of the greatest irritants (for me) on the Internet is the site that somehow thinks it is being trendy when it uses pale text on a white background.

Generally when I come across such a site I get out of it fast unless the information is important in which case I struggle on and curse the designers.

I use ManageWP to manage (!) several web sites.  As this is a tool I use very frequently, the contrast is important, particularly such information as how many sites require updates.  However, they are sadly being ‘trendy’ and feel obliged to display such information in light grey on a white background:

Now apparently there is little I can do about this short of complaining to the crowd who run the site.

But then there is Stylish.

Basically Stylish allows you to apply CSS styles to any or all of the sites you visit.  Naturally it only applies on my browser so it entirely a personal preference thing.  Unfortunately (for some) it requires a fairly good knowledge of CSS and how to discover which selectors on a web page you want to modify, but there are a load of styles already to download for the most popular sites if you so wish.

I applied the following snippet of code to my ManageWP Stylish:

@namespace url(https://www.w3.org/1111/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("orion.managewp.com") {}
body {
color: black !important;
}
.dashboard {
color: black !important;
}
span.filter-count.badge {
color: black !important;
}
.custom-checkbox {
border: 1px solid #999 !important;
}

This is applied automatically to the web page and this is the result:

There was also a problem with my WordPress editing pages which I have been trying to solve for some time.  It was the same sort of problem – writing or editing text in the Post Editor was difficult as the text appeared grey on a white background.  It took me a long time to realise that it wasn’t the font colour that was the problem but actually the font itself.  Once I had worked that out, I thought about changing the font face on all the sites I edit but that would have been tedious, so I just applied a modification using Stylish.

body#tinymce.wp-editor,
.wp-editor-container textarea.wp-editor-area {
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}

Now any site that I edit will have a nice clear font.

Click to enlarge

It’s a handy little gizmo!

Incidentally, this is not a sponsored post – I just thought it might be of some help….