Depends on the person and how affected they are. We do have some partially sighted people on the forum who may be able to assist in answering this question (
@james-martin ?)
I'm not partially sighted, but have done quite a bit of work on sign design in the public realm including developing standards. I can't speak for partially sighted people, but working with some of them in a consultative panel gave me an appreciation of some of the difficulties.
One of the issues is there is no such thing as a standard partially sighted person, and in fact everybody - even the fully sighted - have slightly different perceptions of the things we look at. It is a far more complex subject than most people realise.
My natural eyesight is very poor and I would have to get even closer to the light grey text to be able to read that, compared to the darker bolder text.
That is possibly an example of one of the complexities. I couldn't say for sure without physically measuring the characters on the sign, but looking closely at the text I'd say the black and grey characters are the same font and size - the idea the darker text is "bolder" is probably perception, rather than an actual physical size/shape difference.
This is a known issue in sign design. In a similar (although not identical) situation traffic signs are designed with two slightly different styles of lettering - Transport Heavy and Transport Medium - in order to compensate for a difference in people's perception of white letters on a dark background vs black letters on a light background. When used on the same sign the letters will look the same, but the black characters have slightly larger stroke widths (~bolder)
With the TfW sign it looks like an issue with the lightness of the grey that should have been countered by adopting a marginally larger stroke width.
Partially sighted mean partially sighted not colour blind. They will be able to see exactly the same of both.
Colour blindness has nothing to do with it. But neither will "they" see exactly the same. As lachlan and others have mentioned, the issue with this sign is primarily one of
contrast between the grey writing and the white background.
Although "grey" is commonly known as a 'colour' technically it is an achromatic colour (a colour without colour) which sits somewhere in a range between black and white. For a sign to be legible it is important to maintain the contrast between lettering and the background. If the grey on the TfW sign is somewhere around 50% grey then they have (in very rough terms) made it 50% harder for English readers to understand the sign than Welsh readers. So much for being equal.
Please just use the same font and size for both English and Welsh. Making text fainter makes it harder to read.
I know what you mean, but in this case if the colours stay the same then the grey text font needs to be adapted to give both texts equal weight visually.
Personally I'd replace the grey with a dark red as this would maintain contrast for partially sighted people, whilst making a clear distinction between the languages.
