Comment by kqr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kqr | Hacker News Reader

I had no idea people had so strong feelings about theme toggles. I know some applications offer the choice, but I imagined it was because a small set of developers took it as a fun challenge to implement. One of my banking apps has a theme toggle. I look at that app twice a month to see if I need to rebalance the savings portfolio. It doesn't need a theme toggle. Clearly, the toggle is just the result of a scheduled "fun sprint" in between real work. Right?

But this article implies a theme toggle is table stakes for new development, as implied by the parenthetical:

> (despite the irony that the site that post is published on offers no theming or theme toggle at all)

Like... is that something a website should do? Does this come from a bubble, or have UX people in the industry more broadly moved past "should we provide a theme toggle" into "what is the optimal shape of the theme toggle we obviously must have"?

Maybe I'm old, but I don't expect developers of things to produce multiple themes to suit different preferences. It seems like a complete waste of their time. That time could better be used to improve functionality, fix bugs and stability, or increase behavioural tracking for more specifically targeted advertisements.

Most OSs provide theme toggles by default, thus it has conditioned people to also expect it from websites.

Arguably, I personally loathe it when the site has no dark mode cough Amazon cough as I'm doing some late-night shopping on the bed and the screen blinds my eyes with the white background.

> Clearly, the toggle is just the result of a scheduled "fun sprint" in between real work. Right?

As someone who worked on banking software, absolutely not. It was not fun sprint thing, but actual requirement. We would not do it otherwise. We did not do fun sprints. And if we did, we would pick things are the ones that have less maintenance issues related to them (because you then have to keep both versions forever).

theme toggles may be considered as table stakes depending on accessibility rules in jurisdiction and various other decisions one has made regarding the website.

Honoring the dark/light color scheme set on the device might be a requirement in some cases (I haven't seen a straight answer about it for the EAA) but it is a good accessibility practice.

Including a toggle in an app/site UI so users can choose to not use their device setting is an extra.

I'll just note that the EAA is not the only accessibility law operating in the world.

Furthermore there might be accessibility use cases in which your site works better for some people in dark mode and better for other people in light mode, expecting that people will switch their device settings when they come on your site if you have this problem would not be nice.

I'm most familiar with the U.S., where it's not a requirement. Europe is the only place where I've heard there might be a requirement to honor a device's color scheme, I think it's very unlikely it exists anywhere else.

If a site honors the dark/light setting, I don't know what accessibility need would be served by being in the opposite mode for that one site. Having a toggle to meet preferences, yes, need, I don't know.

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