No, you're not. Sometimes I have to CTRL + A a website to highlight the text so I can read it. If it's a website that I might want to buy something from, I just shut it down and buy somewhere else where I can actually read the text.

I think it also depends on the monitor quality. But yeah it's messed up unless you're 15 or something.

Yeah, low-contrast text is a failure of the web designer, not you.

The first thing to try is just increasing the font size. There'll be an option in your brower's View menu.

If you're trying to read long passages of text, you might want to check out the Readability bookmarklet, which grabs the main text of a page and presents it in a nice-to-read format.

The nuclear option is to install your own user-defined stylesheet, which will alter the display of any web site you visit. Here's a page that can generate a high-contrast stylesheet for you, along with instructions for installing it. (The 'Try stylesheet' button on that page can also be dragged to your bookmarks bar as a bookmarklet, if you just want to apply it as you go on individual pages.)

View -> Page Style -> No Style.

Seconding Readability. I use it all the time and I love it.

This post makes me so happy, just to know my irritation at colored text on dark pages is not (necessarily) GetOffMyLawn territory.

thanks guys, I installed Readability!