Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting
Accessibility and usability issues can and should be reported. I'm not sure if the guideline applies in this case, as the issue has significant impact and the article author might want to be aware of it.
Sure, they should. The problem is, you're not reporting them to the site. You're commenting about them here. Virtually everybody who has to read your report can't do anything about it. Which is, in large part, why we have a rule against writing these kinds of comments.
By all means, report your accessibility problems with sites on HN... to the site owner. Email is a good first move!
I understand your point. But discussing these issues in a public forum has an additional benefit in that it also raises general awareness that they're a problem.
Also, it is an interesting question. Why do we keep seeing blog designs with thin gray text, even though people repeatedly complain about it, and even though text is the centerpiece of a blog? Its not really that difficult to pick a different weight or color. So what causes this problem again and again?
Is it really the case that the rule says "We don't want to hear about accessibility problems because they are boring"? That's just awful.
If they are truly "boring" and that's the only problem, why not let the downvotes take care of it? Why flag?
If the answer is "that's the kind of community we would like to create" let me just point out my third paragraph again and say that that's trully sad.
I'm not sure if the guideline applies in this case
It does, there are lots of mod comments about cases exactly like this. The problem with these is not that accessibility is unimportant or unreadable pages aren't annoying but that they're repetitive.
