leeneia wrote: ....Clear Read. Trouble is, what will it do to pages with geologic maps on them, or musical notation? That's a worry for me.

Reader View, which is what Clear Read provides, doesn't attempt to show everything on the page, so it doesn't help in such cases. It just extracts the main 'story' from amongst the clutter. And it's not on all the time: you click the icon to enable it when you want it and click again to revert to the normal page. (I use it on the NYT website.)

That's fundamentally different to 'accessibility', views like High Contrast which show the whole page. Again, you click them on and off. I agree that one is particularly, er, extreme; there are almost certainly others which will detect low-contrast text, like grey on white, and just change that. You just have to find and try a them - that's usually the case with addons.

So maybe the gray print comes from the authors and there's little we readers can do about it.

There are solutions but they are too techical for ordinary folk. Recently I needed to use an online reference manual with unreadable light-blue links. I wrote a 'userstyle' to fix it - because I can. If you had such a site which you used a lot I or a technical colleague of yours could do the same. But for sites you just use occasionally it's not worth it.

Print Preview looks like a reasonably simple, and understandable, solution.

(Most proposed solutions involving 'default fonts' won't work in this case, BTW. This grey text is not a default, it's actually specified on the site. So you'd have to disable all the site's styles and colours to make that work. That's easier in Firefox than Chrome AFAICS.)