[gnicholas]

I work in accessibility and see lots of posts like this one — cautioning the reader from every doing X because it creates accessibility problems for me.

It may be possible to follow most/all such advice when building an app or website, but surely it is not possible for presentations (which have to be consumed in the same format by everyone present). Some may hate dark text on a light background; others may find that the only suitable format.[1] So when I read posts like these, I don't view them as imperatives ("never do X") but rather as data points to be factored into decision-making processes.

This is easiest when the post explains the problem and gives various alternatives and explains why they provide a better experience. When they just leave it at "never do X", I'm left wondering whether Y is better than Z or vice-versa. I wish the author had given more context about why this is bad for astigmatism, or what sorts of things are better than others (in terms of ranking alternatives).

1: I hear from people who say that the only decent color scheme for BeeLine Reader (my text accessibility startup) is bright red and bright blue. But other people tell me that color scheme is terrible and shouldn't be the default on my website because it is so bad. You literally cannot please all of the people all of the time! [edited]

[nabilhat]

Like other commentors, I have astigmatism. Something not mentioned by other commentors; I have highly asymetrical astigmatism. Reading #FFF against #000 (dark on light or light on dark, either way) with both eyes open causes vividly strobing blue and red visual artifacts.

Stark black text on stark white background can do this, even though stark white background washes out the color artifacts to some extent. Fortunately, it's extremely unusual for anyone to lay out a page as #000 text on a #FFF background.

White text on a black background is a strobing hell. A dead black background is the perfect place to notice visual artifacts. Blazing white text sets visual artifacts effectively. Regardless, I use light-on-dark for much of my work. The problem I run into is that websites often end up being white-on-black, not light-on-dark. Light (not-white) text on a dark (not-black) background is pleasant, and my normal configuration for work.

Web design tutorials typically point out that #000 text on #FFF background is bad, and avoiding such extreme contrasts can be easier on the eyes. For whatever reason, that bit of know-how seems to vanish as soon as it's flipped to "dark mode".

[gnicholas]

Thanks for the detailed description! It's interesting to think about how one would meet these needs while simultaneously meeting the needs of people with scotopic sensitivity (prefer light text on dark background) and vision loss (require high contrast).

Honestly it seems like this three-way comparison is excellent evidence for the need for user-configurable reading options. It is unfortunate that on mobile, there are no browser plugins (except Firefox on Android, which is little-known, and action extensions on Safari, which is both little-known and does not support persistently-running plugins). As the world has gone mobile, we've ended up working/reading in app silos that cannot be made more accessible/configurable by plugins.