•  Max-P   ( @Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me ) 
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    4 months ago

    Just a friendly reminder that there’s accessibility problems with dark themes.

    For me dark themes look like this because I have astigmatism:

    White on black text with astigmatism

    Black on white doesn’t have this issue because all the white around it does is slightly blur into the black text and makes it a little grey at worst.

    Any dark theme for a longer period of time also causes the white text to burn in my retina for a couple minutes, and I just see lines when I look away, and also makes reading a long article difficult and painful.

    Dark themes look so much better, but keep in mind some people have very good reasons to prefer light themes. There’s no need for dark theme elitism.

    • I think what Brodie showed at the end was already really great. I know a graphics designer and number 1 rule is to never use black and white.

      But of course this only works if you have full control over all apps, libadwaita? Dont theme my apps? Damn Electron?

    • I was a light theme user for very long time, until a few years ago I met Vim with the theme gruvbox (dark). Check out gruvbox, it’s my favorite theme of all time. Often there are multiple variants from it, with slight difference in contrast and coloring. For long text reading I prefer black on white, but nowadays I use dark themes for operating system and many other stuff. Especially for programming / scripting its much more readable as dark theme, for whatever reason.

      I’m still conflicted, because most dark themes suck, but most light themes are acceptable. Have a look here, gruvbox has a light theme and dark theme: https://github.com/morhetz/gruvbox

  •  Eugenia   ( @eugenia@lemmy.ml ) 
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    124 months ago

    I have astigmatism, so I can’t work with dark themes. I can’t read correctly when everything is black around. For me, the perfect theme is the one that has a black window manager, gray variations on specific widgets, and white windows (the background desktop image I prefer it to be blue-ish). Basically, to work properly, I need a mostly light, but mixed environment that provides contrast. Not all white, and definitely not all black. So far, I haven’t found such a theme, because no GUI environment allows for such specificity in theming for the various widgets. Although the default Gnome theme ain’t too bad.

  • To be honest, this seems to me like a pretty bad take with weird and kind of BS arguments. Why are professional designer, both those working for some of the biggest tech companies and those working in open source project, making these choices? It couldn’t be for actual reasons or because they actually prefer it like that. No, they are “afraid of color”. Or implying that dark theme exist because of these black on white themes, as a mean to escape it. It just weird backwards logic to justify his taste and shouldn’t be necessary to just state that he prefer a different kind of themes.

    To me, the Windows themes he showed as positive examples look way to cluttered and busy, even though they don’t show this much information. I don’t need the theme to be “exiting”, I need them to display the information in an easily readable way. And dark theme aren’t there just for people who dislike the modern light theme. Having a light and a dark theme (and ideally having the app follow your system preference) actually serves a purpose. You can actively switch between them depending on the context, the time of day, the brightness of the room or any other reason to make the screen easily readable and comfortable to look at.