Reader mode in Safari (at least on iOS) renders this nicely for me automagically, and turns the grey to a nice black.

For the desktop I was going to recommend Distill Mode in Chrome (add --enable-dom-distiller to the command line/launcher, then it's available from the vertical "..." menu top right) but it didn't behave the way I remembered it. You get a nicely formatted page with all (or at least most) of the extraneous crap filtered out, but the grey remains.

Internet Explorer supposedly has a Reading Mode too, but I can't find it on my desktop.

Firefox has a reader mode too, which works perfectly also.

Oh yes, thank you. I'd forgotten all about that .. it works well. Overall it'd be nice if I didn't _have_ to do it though.

So right. I have a grease monkey script globally to inject css to make text black. Which works well except when the background is dark of course. But I find reading light text on dark background also an effort so I usually just skip that.

On Firefox you can ask the browser to disable CSS, or even just to ignore any text color defined within CSS (thus using your browser defaults).

Or just use the reader mode.

The text is dark gray on my screen (hex color #4d4d4d, which is 70% black). You might want to try adjusting your monitor settings.

How rude to someone who has difficulties to see because of age.

I certainly didn't mean to be rude...? I was trying to help OP identify and fix the problem they were having.

rude? I thought he was being helpful

Well, I have a regular MacBook pro with a retina display with no customization, and it has been well calibrated for most every webpage I have seen.

The text is larger, and thicker than usual text in a newspaper or book, and it is just as black, or even more black (measured on a calibrated display).

You might want to change your monitor, or recalibrate it, because it seems like this is an issue with your display.

Photo: https://i.imgur.com/o5bknYs.jpg (The text on the newspaper there is #574839, while the text on the linked site is #454545. The text in the newspaper is the equivalent of 10px tall, and 1px thick, the text on the site is 16px tall and 2.5px thick)

Poor contrast and unreadable font is still visible even on your screenshot, the complaints are valid.

> Poor contrast and unreadable font is still visible even on your screenshot,

That’s an artifact of the camera, not the page. On a properly calibrated screen supporting the Rec.2020 colorspace with at least 1000 nits of color, this will have more than enough contrast.

The big problem is that today, between #454545 and the background a user with a 1000 nits screen and one with a 100 nits screen will see a difference in contrast of almost an order of magnitude.

TL;DR: Either you need to calibrate your screen, need a better one, or we need a way to specify the absolute brightness that a page should be shown with in code.

I have the latest MacBook pro with a Retina display. It is a superb display, and if that needs to be calibrated at all to view a web page, something is definitely wrong with the web page.