> 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.
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.