TIL that "dark mode" in French is "Le mode sombre"; I'm gonna call it Sad Mode now

[cosmolinguist]

Next weekend D and I are going to Electromagnetic Field, "a non-profit UK camping festival for those with an inquisitive mind or an interest in making things: hackers, geeks, scientists, engineers, artists, and crafters." We have friends who go/have gone, and D has been interested in this since the last one -- it has happened every other year.

About three weeks ago, we were invited to look at the list of workshops, talks and other suchlike that people had volunteered to give. Showing an interest at that point would help organizers prioritize and allocate space to things, so I was keen to help out, especially as someone only interested in the less-techie things.

I spent maybe ten or fifteen minutes on the website after dinner, and by the end of it I had vertigo, the beginning of a migraine, and had to go to bed at like 7:30 that evening.

All because the website only has dark mode. This is what happens when I try to use dark themes.

I was really surprised, at first, that such a nerd thing didn't have any other options. But then I shouldn't have been surprised; my "favorite" example of how light themes are treated is in how Discord explained their approach to theirs:

Even within our office, it was hard to find more than one or two actual light theme users. Our small team of designers didn’t design with it in mind when creating new features. It became an afterthought. Testing on light theme was rare, and considered a chore.

It eventually became a Discord community inside joke that light theme was bad and you were bad for using it.

(That post is almost five years old and it was written to announce the new golden age of light theme; I started using Discord after that and I still hate it, haha. But it's amazing to see how much worse it was! The sidebar was still dark! Because no one could need to read those words too! The contrast is terrible! If you love dark so much why is the text medium-grey?! The fonts are so thin! Fonts are the thing that shouldn't be light even in light mode! (Wow that link is from 2016, read it when it was new, I've been referring to it ever since, and the problem still exists!))

D kindly emailed EMF to ask about a light mode for the website at that time. He never got any response.

Yesterday and today we've been sent emails with a much more detailed schedule and a request to sign up for things by Wednesday. I idly clicked on the link and when I saw the website open I panicked at the sight of it and quickly closed the tab again. That's when I asked D if he'd had a reply to his email. He hadn't, so he opened am issue on their github, explaining that the lack of a light mode means I'm unable to engage with or contribute to EMF. This quickly got a reply, but not an encouraging one.

Thanks for the feedback! Unfortunately adding a different colour theme is quite a lot of work - we certainly won't have time to add it for this event, and I don't think we can really commit to maintaining two colour themes in the long term at this point either.

For what it's worth, the website does meet the WCAG guidelines for minimum contrast (with one or two exceptions I just spotted and will try to get fixed). Not trying to diminish your partner's experience here, but we do take this seriously.

Personally I think the light-on-dark design is getting a bit tired and my preference is to try and move towards a dark-on-light theme for our next redesign. So we will definitely take this into account then.

Neither of us know anything about web development, but I'm not used to hearing that it's prohibitively difficult to have light and dark modes...and indeed an online pal has confirmed for that it shouldn't be, for what that's worth.

It all seems overly defensive to me. Mentioning the WCAG standards for color contrast felt off; I never mentioned problems with the contrast. It does actually matter what the colors are, as well! Combined with "not to diminish [my] problems, in the midst of absolutely diminishing my problems, it was just not great.

I'm sure from this person's perspective it looks like "someone waited until the last minute to complain, we can't overhaul everything in a few days..." which I get makes me sound like an asshole. Especially when this is all done by volunteers. But it's frustrating because a few days before the event is when I've been asked to interact with the website. Previously I'd sort of ignored it and gotten my information through the sighted person I'm going with. Which is not great, but that kind of thing all disabled people will recognize because that happens a lot!

D, bless him, was willing to brush off his rudimentary CSS skills and bodge something together that I (and anyone else who wants a light mode and doesn't care about the aesthetics too much) can use. He had a briefly frustrating but apparently educational afternoon figuring out how to make that happen!

Comments

[packbat]

This is definitely in the category of "extremely easy unless you screw yourself over by building a system which cannot support two themes". 😒

[cosmolinguist]

Thank you, it's good to have confirmation of that.

<3

[davidgillon]

my "favorite" example of how light themes are treated is in how Discord explained their approach to theirs:

Which did at least make me realise there must be a setting to change modes and go hunt it down. Light mode now enabled. Thanks!

[cosmolinguist]

You're welcome! Glad to help, however inadvertently. :)

[otter]

Ugh. Ableism.

[sfred]

Ugh, I'm sorry.
I hope you have a good time when you get there.

[cosmolinguist]

I hope so too. It'll be such a new thing for me!

[rmc28]

That discord post is a brilliant example of how lack of diversity in a team makes products worse. (And it doesn't seem like they had a user experience team that could overrule the in-group complacency.) Also couldn't help noticing the "two light mode users" thanked by name are women and every other named person seems male.

Entirely separately, my work buddy Rob is going to EMF for the very first time, he does a lot of volunteering at the Cambridge MakeSpace in his spare time, and I think he'll be selling some amazing 3D-printed dragons. Anyway, he's lovely, say hi from me if you meet him.

[cosmolinguist]

Yay, I will look out for him!

Also couldn't help noticing the "two light mode users" thanked by name are women and every other named person seems male.

Oof, I missed that, goddammit. I mean like I said this is old, I hope things are better now culturally, but I don't really think so. One thing I meant to say in this post and forgot is that the response I got refers to the dark theme "getting a bit tired" and the "preference" of the answerer, still treating these things like merely matters of opinion or taste rather than of access (they are also matters of opinion and taste, of course, but secondarily to access).

[momentsmusicaux]

It's non-trivial, because you need to add a UI for it and then store a cookie so the preference sticks from one page to another, and then you need to add a stupid cookie popup to get permission to store that. And you need to test your second set of CSS styles work across the whole site, on all the different elements. And the site has a slightly handmade feel to it so I can see how that might be fiddly.

On the other hand, they're presenting themselves as techies, hackers, and geeks of all stripes, so WTF, this should totally be something they can do or they're really not worth their salt.

If I were in charge of that site, however, rather than support a light mode, I'd try to figure out why Firefox isn't offering reader mode (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clutter-free-web-pages), which I would have thought it a good way of ensuring accessibility.

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah, it would be great if reader mode worked, that's my usual go-to to solve the problem of websites I can't read. But even if it did, when we were being asked to "favorite" things, that wasn't just on a page of text but required interaction (clicking the little heart to indicate the favorite, but also needing to click on the title of the event to expand it to find the description of what it was, something that was almost always essential to making a choice because the titles didn't give a lot of information!) and that stuff either doesn't work properly or doesn't even show up in reader mode.

[momentsmusicaux]

Is that on the schedule page?

Oh yeah, WT actual fucking fuck, the schedule loads over JavaScript AFAICT. That's just total bullshit.

And having looked at the source just now, the markup's not very good either. They've used headings for the days at least, but the items should be in lists.

[cosmolinguist]

Yes the content of the schedule page has changed pretty significantly (using the same URL for "help us gauge interest" and later "actually sign up for things" doesn't seem great to me either but I don't know), but I expect the underlying structure of the website is the same.

[moem]

It surprises me that they reacted in such a lackluster way. I have better experiences with this organisation, although that was years ago and I do not have any disabilities myself. I do know that in the weeks before the event starts, everything seems to need to happen at the same time and people are just low level burnt out. BUT this is something that should have been dealt with a long time ago.

I do expect (and I certainly hope) you will enjoy the event. I had a great time there, more than once. The international hacker scene has quite a bit to offer.

[jo]

I have a bookmarklet that is a javascript applet that toggles dark mode sites to light mode. It works perfectly every time. You just have to create a new bookmark in your bookmark toolbar and paste in the code in the URL field. The code is here: https://gist.github.com/Jeremie-Chauvel/075eab2c8f6026aa6bfe5259cf486f96

[barakta]

I am not a web dev (thank fuck) but I agree that 2 themes shouldn't be hard to do if it's coded properly. It smells from comments thus far that the website is not well (or accessibly) coded.

And you didn't ask last minute, they were emailed ages ago and ignored it.

I'm glad bodges helped you with access, very frustrating to have to use something that fries your visuals/brain, I too am susceptible to this issue and it's exhausting. I only use dark mode if I'm actively having a migraine and on specific (fat fonted) things, otherwise I prefer a light mode which is not blindingly white but still has BLACK text at a decent heaviness.

[silveradept]

That is interesting, given that dark mode, at least for when I was starting to see it, was touted as an accessibility item for people who didn't want to deal with bright screens. That it became an aesthetic doesn't surprise me, but still. Surely at this point in our lives on the web, we can build things that are first accessible and then apply the flair and the aesthetics on top of that.

(And yet.)

[cosmolinguist]

Now that it's an aesthetic, there are so many weird justifications for dark mode, including accessibility. There are so many kinds of visual impairments though, it can't be said that either dark or light is inherently more accessible. And considering that dark mode is harder to read for people with astigmatism and that's like 50% of people...it doesn't seem like a good choice if you're only going to have one choice.

But then I doubt it was a decision, I imagine it was just what the people who made the website are used to using themselves because it is popular these days, and so they never considered doing this website any differently.

[silveradept]

That is perfectly on brand for so many things on the web: "We like it this way, and we can't imagine any other user who also wouldn't want to use it this way."

[ewt]

Oof, I'm sorry to hear this, that is not a great response at all.

As an aside -- my housemate is going to EMF Camp too -- and really, really enjoyed it last time he went. I would like to go sometime as it sounds very adjacent to some of my interests, but I don't actually camp very well due to jointcrap and so haven't yet worked out a viable way to do it.

[diffrentcolours]

Our camp setup is intended to accommodate mother_bones so we've spent a fair amount of money on a tent which can accommodate a kingsize, high-lift memory foam air mattress. I haven't found a better solution than "spend lots of money" sadly.

[ewt]

I also don't drive, so transporting a mattress is probably not happening anytime soon.

[jesse_the_k]

Yeah what kind of alpha techies are they if they don't understand they don't comprise every web use case? Hope the EMF camp is more fun than that BS.

[cosmolinguist]

I've heard good things about it. And while there are some talks and things that seem fine, I'm also fully prepared to hang out in our tent and read books and drink beer for a few days. :)

[meepettemu]

If you come across a large wall of lights that respond to music and can be programmed to write simple phrases that is a friend of mine :)