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Dear web developers: set the font color, too

luu.io

141–150 of 151 posts

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

#141

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.

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

#142
post #38
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does HN stack up in terms of accessibility? Anyone using a screen reader with HN? What do you wish was different?

I struggle with how low contrast it is. I skip 'Ask HN' style posts because they are too hard to read.

I suggest highlighting the text to read in reverse video.

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

#143
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer day-mode when in bright light. Otherwise the black background ends up reflecting the bright light. I often prefer night-mode when it is not bright out, and at nighttime.

I think the problem is that many of the "dark themes" have grayish fonts that give low contrast. If the font were pure white, the resulting contrast is much more usable in bright light I achieve this by setting my display to higher contrast to blow out the grays, in bright light.

I’m not actually using night themes, but rather OS-level inversion. It might be that it’s the same effect because the text is actually dark grey, which ends up being inverted to light grey.

I actually think it’s more likely that many sites use very lightweight fonts, which means that in night mode there’s a lot of dark pixels showing.

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

#144

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…

Try the firefox plugin "dark background light text"

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

#145
I didn't think about this in that case. Thanks for the article. I especially like using this color in my forms: https://hexcol.com/color/f9f9f9 and i'm doing this really often. To be honest, I think those system architects should take care of this bug more than web developers, but it's just one more line in code for us, so it's worth to think about.

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

#146
Tangentially related question: is it up to the developer to make forms do stuff like use the number pad on a phone instead of the QWERTY keyboard when the user is asked for a zip code or telephone number? Is this not something that is just auto-baked in to modern web dev frameworks?

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

#147

This is a real issue for me at times. I have a dark theme set in Gnome, because I want dark system windows, but lots of sites don't bother setting their colours properly, so if I open the Web UI for my Ubiquiti Router, or one of my switches, and try to select a drop-down, the background of it is dark, like my system theme, and the text is dark, so I can't see what I'm choosing. Other times, like if I'm entering text…

Would be cool, if websites would ask, if you like bright or dark website.

I'm not so worried about the theme of the site as I am about being able to read and enter text.

I'd be perfectly happy with "just" Firefox not using system controls and using some default.

Asking for a site that can change themes seems to much to ask of a web developer (/jk)

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

#148

Browsers on macOS appear to be smart enough to not pass through the system dark theme to web content. I'm seeing white forms in Safari and Firefox (Chrome doesn't seem to support dark theming at all). As much as I'm a proponent of OS-native UX, CSS styling of form controls on the web has been a crapfest ever since IE(?) introduced it way back when. Whenever CSS touches a web form control it should just go completely…

> Browsers on macOS appear to be smart enough to not pass through the system dark theme to web content. There two main reasons here: * Browsers don't support dark themes themselves. * Browsers don't support @media(prefers-color-scheme).

Both Safari and Firefox support the macOS Mojave dark theme

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

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be cool, if websites would ask, if you like bright or dark website.

Do you want a pop up every time you browse a page?

Something like the Docker solution would be fine;

https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/builder/

(Note, the right hand bar and thus the toggle isn't visible on mobile or narrow windows)

There is a toggle, between day/night mode in the right hand bar on the page, it lets you toggle between the dark and light themes with a click.

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

#150
post #99
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this! I've been dealing with this issue for a while now and somehow didn't think to use CSS to fix it (despite having a number of custom stylesheets for various sites).

I think it still needs some work. A couple of months ago I opened a webpage with documentation. It had a table of contents in the sidebar, and it was invisible. White on white. It was because these were simply links, and not input field elements. Perhaps the solution is as simple as assigning these rules to html or body instead of these elements, and letting it cascade. There might also be stylesheets online meant to…

Yeah, I'm definitely in the process of tweaking it; I'd rather still have the inputs be dark with white text, but messing with things like buttons can make some sites have some glaring differences. I think the main insight I got from this is that I can at least use CSS to tweak this sort of thing; beforehand, I was just opening up Gnome Tweak Tool and changing the theme whenever I needed to do something like comments on a Google doc, and this is a much better solution.

Thanks again!

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