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Dear web developers: set the font color, too

luu.io

21–30 of 151 posts

Re: Dear web developers: set the font color, too

#21
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dark mode is actually coming from the GNOME system colors, not browser plugin. From inspecting the CSS in the developer console, the cases in the screenshot either set the background color without setting the text color, or vice versa.

I have a dark theme enabled on xfce, and this is not a problem for me in chromium. The inputs in native apps are dark, but they are the default light color in web pages on chromium.

Really? I might have to switch then.. I use Firefox and GNOME, and enabling one of the dark themes causes most forms on the web to become unusable because of this very issue.

Re: Dear web developers: set the font color, too

#22

...what? Set the default color in your dumbass hacker theme too. This has nothing to do with accessibility, which is obvious because the author thinks a gray background with lower contrast for text reading is better.

By "dumbass hacker theme" you mean "the dark theme that ships with MacOS", right?

Re: Dear web developers: set the font color, too

#24

What has happened to the concept of "User Defined CSS"? Is it totally gone? Did Chrome kill it? Browsers should be making this a prominent and first-class feature. Users should be able to quickly and easily set their default styles for various elements and choose at what precedence level they apply.

Not disagreeing, but why is this a good thing? Apart from that it's fun, are users really expected to be able to improve their browsing experiences with custom CSS?

Re: Dear web developers: set the font color, too

#25

...what? Set the default color in your dumbass hacker theme too. This has nothing to do with accessibility, which is obvious because the author thinks a gray background with lower contrast for text reading is better.

Agree with the low contrast complaint, but the OP article is right. The web developers have assumed what the text field colors will be. So when they override one color (either FG or BG), they need to set the other one as well, and not assume that it will match what's on their own screen.

Re: Dear web developers: set the font color, too

#26

I hit this same same issue too. I tried to eliminate white backgrounds, because I find it tiring on my eyes and a bit painful. These sites made it too annoying to change the defaults, so I ended up giving up (and just always having my screen brightness near minimum). But before I gave up I started collecting sites that either set background-color and not font color, or set color but not background-color: https://gist…

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Re: Dear web developers: set the font color, too

#27

...what? Set the default color in your dumbass hacker theme too. This has nothing to do with accessibility, which is obvious because the author thinks a gray background with lower contrast for text reading is better.

This is not the problem. The parts of a HTML form control that are not defined through CSS are taken from the system default theme by the browser. Usually this is white on black, but this is NOT guaranteed (e.g. high contrast schemes for vision impaired users). Web designers tend to use these default schemes when writing the CSS for a web site. So they write only the attributes they need to make it work on their setup. So if the textbox background or text color is already what they want, they don't define it. This the browser takes the non-matching system color instead- precisely because it was set in a "dumbass" scheme (I resent this term).

Re: Dear web developers: set the font color, too

#28

I hit this same same issue too. I tried to eliminate white backgrounds, because I find it tiring on my eyes and a bit painful. These sites made it too annoying to change the defaults, so I ended up giving up (and just always having my screen brightness near minimum). But before I gave up I started collecting sites that either set background-color and not font color, or set color but not background-color: https://gist…

there's a contrast/brightness button on most hardware, why have low contrast websites by design? just tune your monitor! it will then work for websites, games and everything else.

it will also allow you to handle contrast reducing it at night and tuning up when the monitor is struck with some glare, without having to change the css! imagine the convenience!

software developer: using hammers for everything since 1842

Re: Dear web developers: set the font color, too

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a dark theme enabled on xfce, and this is not a problem for me in chromium. The inputs in native apps are dark, but they are the default light color in web pages on chromium.

Really? I might have to switch then.. I use Firefox and GNOME, and enabling one of the dark themes causes most forms on the web to become unusable because of this very issue.

There's nothing special about Chrome's implementation here. You can override the widget GTK theme in Firefox by setting the "widget.content.gtk-theme-override" configuration option to something like "Adwaita" or "Arc".

Re: Dear web developers: set the font color, too

#30
post #22

...what? Set the default color in your dumbass hacker theme too. This has nothing to do with accessibility, which is obvious because the author thinks a gray background with lower contrast for text reading is better.

By "dumbass hacker theme" you mean "the dark theme that ships with MacOS", right?

[deleted]
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