Great point yeah. I also think it should be easier to tell browsers to make text high contrast, design be damned. Fundamentally it's an accessibility issue.
Last time I was in this situation, the UX expert and I had the entire dev team stand at the back of a conference room and vote on which font was most legible. All but one agreed Verdana was the easiest. Not only that, but it was still more legible than our previous font at 1pt smaller text, which meant we could get more info onto the screen. Not tons more, but we were having to truncate text in some spots, and sometimes even one or two more letters is enough for people to get the gist without having to backseat drive the presenter. It's subtle but I was beginning to recognize this as an important waste of time and energy when we were dogfooding our app.
When people are already getting short with each other before you even get to the actual reason for the meeting, you know it's going to be a long day.
But corporate wanted our fonts to match their other product. I don't know if it was my imagination or not, but it felt like that act broke a couple people on the team, myself included.
