Hacker News Reader

Comment by kvonhorn | Hacker News Reader

You know what's an accessibility problem for a lot of people over 40? White text on a dark background. I don't think I'll ever get tired of hearing people advocate for making web pages readable for people my age.

Yeah, opening up the inspector and updating the author's CSS made it readable for me, but made the shell script unreadable.

View on HN

I'm under 40 and this puts immense strain on my eyes. After reading a few paragraphs if I look over to the wall I will see persistent shadow-text in my vision for 30 seconds or more. Very uncomfortable.

It's to the point that if highlighting all the text doesn't mitigate the dark/white contrast, I'll just avoid reading that page entirely.

Wow, that's harsh; sorry to hear that.

I suppose you have already tried to decrease the brightness of your screen. Say, 400 nit at 100% brightness is searing, unless you're under sunlight.

I’m 30 and been this way since at least 19. I can’t stand most darkmode implementations because they often suck. Good ones are nice.

I love coding with white themes and full brightness. Never feel tired. Very lucky in that sense.

I know that shadow text vision all too well. I find it helpful to lower the brightness when viewing text like that.

I’m using Dark Reader extension on sites like that. It may sound absurd to do that, but it actually re-colors bs colorschemes and has quick settings for relative brightness, contrast and saturation, so you can tune it to acceptable levels. Without it my eyes bleed on dark toxic sites as much as yours. It also works good with syntax highlighting, because it uses “dynamic coloring” which guesses best color maps for every page.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-reader/eimadp...

Unfortunately a lot of accessibility concerns are of competing interest against each other and people making webpages don't have infinite time to allocate to ensuring they have options for everyone. You might consider just disabling css altogether.

Or get in the habit of using the browsers reader mode. You can style it to your liking and it generally does a great job, at least for me in Firefox where I use it frequently

I'm not yet 40 but it's the other way round for me. I have bad floaters so a white background makes them stand out.

One really good thing in the last five years has been most major user interfaces now having both a dark mode and a light mode.

Use for browsers, you might try to play around with the "Dark Reader" addon. While normally used for setting a universal dark mode, you can also a white mode, either globally or per site.

Not exactly the same problem, but a lot of the times I see dark to medium gray text on a light to medium gray background.

For me, the solution to this is:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/font-contrast...

Forces the text to black at least. Pretty reliable. Sometimes needs overrides which are easy to do.

Why do you find it hard to read?

Biology. I’m in my 50s and get an eye exam every year. According to my optometrist my prescription has been stable for about a decade, but I can definitely tell the difference. My eyes do not focus very fast anymore, my eyes do not adjust going from a light space to a dark space or vice versa very fast anymore. I now have to hold books and my phone away from me to bring them into focus. Same with white text on dark backgrounds. I used to use dark themes for everything, but it just doesn’t work for me anymore. I’ve mentioned these to my optometrist and they say that it happens to everyone with age.

What about yellow text on brown background like [0] ? I use this combo in my editor to avoid changing to light theme on bright days and dark theme at night.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/Ynvrm3p.png

It is not as easy to read as black on a light background.

Not that old, but I have astigmatism. And every spot of light has a glow around it. Black on white is better because the characters only got thinner. But light characters on dark background is like having tiny projectors and the shapes are not recognizable at a glance.

The web says that astigmatism leads to glowing, blurry text when it is shown white on dark. The iris narrowing in bright conditions seems to reduce the effect, while the widened iris in low light seems to worsen it.

I have astigmatism. Bright on dark renders with lens flares.

On a computer I can just use light mode and it’s fine. Driving at night … I really hate bright lights on tall SUVs.

Here’s an example of what it looks like (glasses help): https://beta-ctvnews-ca.cdn.ampproject.org/i/s/beta.ctvnews....

Man, everyone hates bright lights on tall SUVs except their owners, who are blissfully unconcerned with the trail of migraines they leave in their wake.

Dark letters on white background are objectively more legible, there’s research on that - unless the screen is trying to burn a hole in your eyes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com