[lrpe]

No your writing is fine, and sorry if I'm being a negative nancy. It's just that light text on black backgrounds cause me eye strain so they're not really my cup of tea. The light grey font color does help a litte though. I often experience lines of text being burned into my vision with these themes, and that effect was not as noticeable here.

I am admittedly not a fan of dark themes in general, but I feel they are done right when the dark background is toned down a bit so you're not staring at a pitch black screen. And not just by a few shades.

As an aside, I didn't even know GitHub had a dark theme. I just tried it and it was horrible. Then I switched from dark default to dark dimmed and it was much more tolerable, although I still prefer light.

[ajxs]

That's okay, I really appreciate the feedback! I'll give this some thought and see if I can tweak the colours a little. I often find myself falling back on Firefox's 'Reader View' if I find a website's colour theme a bit too jarring.

[DHPersonal]

Would you consider it against the intention of your site to include either a dark/light theme toggle, a prefers-color-theme CSS style, or both?

[ajxs]

I'll have a look at what I can do with prefers-color-scheme. It seems like a good solution. Thank you for the suggestion!

[kyleyeats]

The colors are fine. It's the text measure (around 90) that's having the user do too much work. That should be around 55-60.

[ajxs]

I've never heard this term 'text measure' before. Do you mean the number of characters per-line in the main content column? I tried to research the optimal column width, but the answers seem to vary so much. Just doing a quick search online right now: This source[1] says 55-100, which is a pretty big range. Although this source[2] claims that research suggests that "Reading speed was highest at 95cpl, and lowest at 35cpl on screen".

I'll take your suggestion on-board at any rate, and might make some adjustments to the font-size, or cpl. Thanks for your help!

1: https://medium.com/ben-shoemate/optimum-web-readability-max-...

2: https://www.viget.com/articles/the-line-length-misconception...

[kyleyeats]

Yep, that's the one. It depends on how many curveballs you're throwing at the user. I'm working on a monospace library that looks wide at 48 characters per line.

That's what the inverted text is here, a curveball. It's not the problem itself but it is asking more of the user every line. Just eyeballing it, .blog-entry looks correct, at least text measure wise, with a max-width of 500px.

[olddustytrail]

If you have to use Reader View that is a clear sign that the website is broken.

[Andrex]

The point of a dark theme is to be... dark. What darkness of gray would be agreeable to you? Just curious. #111 too dark? #444?

Anything #666 or higher is way too light for an aesthetically-pleasing dark background imo.

[cratermoon]

Web accessibility guidelines suggest a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1, or for AAA success 7:1. https://webaim.org/articles/contrast/

At 13.5:1, the contrast ratio on your site (#D8DAD7/#0F100F) is a bit much. With a background of #444444 the ratio would be 6.92:1, just shy of a AAA result.

You can check your colors at https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

[selfsimilar]

WCAG doesn't define a maximum contrast.

edit:

Interesting discussion about the effect of fonts, dyslexia, and dark-mode wrt "too much contrast" in this UX StackExchange thread. https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/123504/maximum-contra...

[cratermoon]

Yes, I know. The question was about what is "dark enough", given a light foreground text. #444444 is dark enough.

[Andrex]

I'm out of date then, I thought high contrast was desirable.

Edit- also I'm not the OP.

[zamadatix]

I don't think you're out of date rather the parent is conflating WCAG saying "don't have contrast less than" as if it meant "your contrast should be near".

[cratermoon]

No, the question was about what background is "dark enough", i.e. sufficiently dark to provide good contrast with the foreground color.

[zamadatix]

Ah, that is definitely true and I agree with your conclusion about it. I think these two replies were specifically in response to the "At 13.5:1, the contrast ratio on your site (#D8DAD7/#0F100F) is a bit much" portion though, it read as if 13.5:1 was too much contrast instead of just more than the minimum. Sorry for misinterpreting that bit!