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Comment by Andrex | Hacker News Reader

The point of a dark theme is to be... dark. What darkness of gray would be agreeable to you? Just curious. #111 too dark? #444?

Anything #666 or higher is way too light for an aesthetically-pleasing dark background imo.

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Web accessibility guidelines suggest a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1, or for AAA success 7:1. https://webaim.org/articles/contrast/

At 13.5:1, the contrast ratio on your site (#D8DAD7/#0F100F) is a bit much. With a background of #444444 the ratio would be 6.92:1, just shy of a AAA result.

You can check your colors at https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

I'm out of date then, I thought high contrast was desirable.

Edit- also I'm not the OP.

I don't think you're out of date rather the parent is conflating WCAG saying "don't have contrast less than" as if it meant "your contrast should be near".

No, the question was about what background is "dark enough", i.e. sufficiently dark to provide good contrast with the foreground color.

Ah, that is definitely true and I agree with your conclusion about it. I think these two replies were specifically in response to the "At 13.5:1, the contrast ratio on your site (#D8DAD7/#0F100F) is a bit much" portion though, it read as if 13.5:1 was too much contrast instead of just more than the minimum. Sorry for misinterpreting that bit!

Thank you for helping me clarify my point; I definitely could have done better.

WCAG doesn't define a maximum contrast.

edit:

Interesting discussion about the effect of fonts, dyslexia, and dark-mode wrt "too much contrast" in this UX StackExchange thread. https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/123504/maximum-contra...

Yes, I know. The question was about what is "dark enough", given a light foreground text. #444444 is dark enough.

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