Oh look, changing the background color solves a specific problem. Just like the post you replied to mentioned.

Ultimately I'd prefer a slight tweak - for example eee/111 or similar but I'd still prefer fff/000 to the ridiculously low contrast foreground/background trend in recent years. Perfect example: https://peach-melpa.org/ - on my equipment and with my eye sight, that's literally unreadable.

Scrolling on that site on my phone is incredibly broken too

If it's really painful, make sure you lower your monitor's brightness. Basically, the white color on the monitor should be the of same brightness as a sheet of white paper near it.

At the expense of losing details in the blacks? I have some monitors where gamm adjustments only will take me so far.

Sounds like you have a cheap, low-quality monitor.

Is that relevant?

Then that's a problem that you can solve, typically with a single line in your stylesheet. Doesn't damn the concept by any means.

You're saying this because black on white hurts your eyes? Because if I'm reading something, I really don't care about what the text looks like and that's what black on white is good at: distraction free reading.

If black-on-white is painful to look at, your monitor is too bright. Sadly, this is the case for the substantial majority of people, and so as web developers/designers/implementers we have to take it into account.

Laptops tend to have the ability to conveniently adjust brightness, but then everyone went with ambient light sensors, and because they’re really pretty terrible at getting it right, laptop and OS manufacturers opted for erring on the side of excessive brightness, and so laptop screens are normally somewhere between too bright and way too bright.

Desktop screens tend to be hard to adjust the brightness of, because the physical unit’s OSD approach to changing brightness is awful, and OS vendors haven’t hooked anything helpful into it for reasons that quite escape me. So most people still have their screens set at the default brightness level, which is way too bright for anything but direct sunlight.

I remember with fondness CRTs that had a physical brightness dial that you could turn. So much better than what we have now.

Phone screens… yeah, they’re normally too bright too for similar reasons to laptops. Again I criticise ambient light sensors.

I went to quite some length to get the screen brightnesses for my Windows laptop and the external displays I normally use even vaguely sane, involving obscure freeware from ten years ago and deep diving into Windows APIs; there are basically two different APIs for working with display brightnesses: laptops’ internal displays use one, and external displays use the other (the internal display is also available through the other, but it doesn’t actually work for changing brightness). Said other API which external monitors need is exposed absolutely nowhere in any UI at all. (Windows basically lies about being unable to adjust brightness of external displays in its Settings app.) Screen-brightness-adjusting keys don’t seem to be interceptable (no hooking onto XF86MonBrightnessUp and XF86MonBrightnessDown as I did on my previous, Arch Linux, laptop), so your only recourse for linking the external displays’ brightness would be detecting the internal monitor’s brightness changing and effecting. (Incidentally, the jump from 0% brightness to 10% brightness is consistently massive on LCDs; I worked around this on Linux by making a logarithmic scale wrapper around xbacklight, but I can’t fix that conveniently on this laptop.)

At present, I just type “b 0”, “b 40” or whatever into Command Prompt and it invokes a CLI-based external-screen-brightness-adjusting program.

In my home office, my external displays normally operate at 20–40% brightness during the day, though I’ve gone up to 70% on occasion before, and 0% brightness during the evening (and I’d prefer −20–−10%; most screens’ minimum brightness is unreasonably bright).

People use the brightness they use. They may have Reasons.

It’s not anyone’s job as a web designer to insist they're wrong.

They may indeed have reasons, but in the substantial majority of cases they don’t, or their reasons are badly flawed, and they would do well to reduce their brightness.

I will continue to recommend that people reduce their brightness in almost all cases. That’s my job as a friendly person.

As a web developer, though, there is little scope for insisting that they’re wrong, which is why I say we have to take most people’s badly configured monitors into account.

Lot of displays I encountered use PWM when you reduce the brightness. That causes the screen to flicker if it's not on 100% (see it yourself via a slow motion cam on you phone).

Good to know. I admit I haven’t seriously used anything but a good quality monitor for the last few years, and simple research suggests PWM is only likely to cause visible artefacts on LED backlights (TFTs are slow enough that they don’t dim completely when cycling quickly), which only became popular fairly recently, so that might account for my being unfamiliar with the probelm. Certainly there are still some types of patterns or of content which when scrolling look awful on LCDs and I understand that PWM (though I didn’t know that was the specific term) can be part of the problem there. Yet for reference, in my earlier teen years and before I always found it hard to cope with CRTs at 60Hz (it rapidly produced migraines, so I used polarising sunglasses to help; 80Hz was barely OK, 90Hz was acceptable and 120Hz which I could use on one monitor was lovely).

> It’s not anyone’s job as a web designer to insist they're wrong.

But this goes both ways. I've seen developers complain about the W3C accessibility standards on contrast because it looks too severe on their retina display full-brightness Macbook.

But the relative cost of having too much contrast (it's uncomfortable to read, but still perfectly legible) and the relative ease of fixing it (turn down your laptop brightness) is very minor when compared against the many people with crappy, low-light displays that can't adjust their brightness or fix the problem of low contrast text.

Often what people mean when they say to optimize for what people have is that they'd prefer to optimize for the highest quality devices first. But for a nontrivial number of websites and demographics, those devices are the minority, and in those situations high-contrast black-on-white text will look better on a wider variety of the devices that ordinary people are using.

I feel like this is an idea for a simple browser plugin. If the site is #000 text on a #fff background, apply a stylesheet with lower contrast.

If high contrast is painful to look at, and you can't control web designers throughout the world, but you can control your own web browser... then why are you still suffering?

There's an extension for that. http://darkreader.org/

Some browsers (Chrome Android) don't support plugins.

Agree. Good proportion of us suffer from glare, pure white is literally painful to read. I usually reach for a dark mode just to be more pleasant. The whole premise of BWD is sound .... Content first, add bling only to solve a UX problem.

What's acceptable background/foreground color combinations that isn't painful to look at, but also not too low on contrast?

I tend toward color: #330; background: #fffff0;

Just off-black on a slightly creamy white.

May even stick with #000 for text.

Giving users ability to select a white, off-white, inverse, or solarised scheme is also useful.

See also https://contrastrebellion.com

That page is funny, I can only read the big text, the rest is too small and zooming is disabled. Message not really understood.

Most useful for the message, though I find it generally readable.

My variant:

https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/pen/KpMqqB

Still too small text to read on my screen and can't zoom

Is it not computing to 16px for your screen? I feel like you must have problems on 99% of websites if 16px font does not render large enough for you to read. Heck, HackerNews renders at 10.6/12px for me.

Ah, the page has a setting for displaysize. It was set to 0.5x when I ooened the link. Most pages work just fine if someone does not fiddle with stuff ;)