WHITE TEXT on BLACK BACKGROUND gives me a FRIGGEN HUGE HEADACHE and EYESTRAIN. It is HORRIBLE. After only 5-10 seconds, I can no longer read it. After I switch back to the normal Google search windows, my eye shows aftereffects, much like looking at a bright light and seeing the light burn-in in your eyes.

I found this interesting, reading it on my high-contrast settings which gives me a black background with lime-green text (which looks white to me.)

I am legally blind, but have a very small ‘hole’ in one eye that allows me to see three or four letters of a word, or in other words, allows me to read, albeit a pain in the rear.

I cannot look at anything white. It causes an extreme glare and pain in the eyes, almost identical to looking at the sun. (Interesting coincidence I must say.) If all web sites were designed with dark backgrounds and light text, I wouldn’t need the high contrast settings at all; however, this is not the case, nor realistic either for that matter.

The point is, many people with visual issues are in the same boat, i.e., require a ddark background and light text in order to read a web page at all. Designers create their sites for people with normal vision, as they are in the majority with rarely much thought to those of us who aren’t so fortunate.

Now it can be said that people like myself can just change their computer settings, and the design is of little consequence. That is true, but you need to remember that their are many (and I mean MANY) people who can see well enough to use normal settings, but have trouble with content on light backgrounds, as in, they can read them, but it is far more difficult. Besides that, no one wants to change their settings to an ugly black and white unless they really have to.

What is the answer? That is not easy to say. Providing a choice in design, for example, two style sheets may be one. Before I switched to a high contrast scheme I used to skip over sites that were hard to read and move on to the next. (Much more business is lost that way than people realize.)

I don’t know that this has helped the debate anyway, but I did want to add that people with impaired vision have a completely different take on this. (Incidentally, there are some people with impaired vision who require the opposite, dark text on a light background, which only further complicates the issue. Most of us, however, need dark backgrounds and light text.)

It’s a dilemma to be sure. I expect little to change.

I really dislike black/dark text on a pure white background. The contrast is just too much for my eyes, and all that bright, white background really hurts my eyes. The best for me is a pale-coloured background with black or dark-coloured text on it (a very pale blue with dark blue text; a pale grey background with black text; and so on).

Wonderful !

I hate light text on dark background too. It’s very painful when reading and concentrating on such a page.

Many thanks for this wonderful tool !

I use Firefox with “Custom Toolbar Buttons” so in the tool bar is an icon that switches a page with bad colors to my chosen default colors. Simple fix. I use it more often than I would like.
I also have a slight red-green color problem. On some pages I cannot read the headers with yellow or orange on white. This one is OK, but is easier to read when I use Custom Toolbar Buttons – Page Colours to switch the orange to blue.

I also find light on dark less tiring to read. Switching back and forth between your test pages, it’s the transition between dark and light that takes a little time to adjust, and not the inverse.

Also, I’m not used to the blinding luminosity and contrast people usually use in their display, and invariably lower them 50-70% before I can get a comfortable position. Dark on light only makes things worse, since a majority of the screen will be lit instead of a minority.

I was also going to mention daringfireball… it’s just about the nicest light-on-dark implementation I can think of. Just because it’s usually done poorly doesn’t mean it can’t be done well.

I always preferred light on dark, I think this is mainly because i spend a lot of time using the terminal (which i cant stand to read when its dark on light). I would love it if i where able to do most of my web browing in elinks, which by the way, your site shows up great in.

I think for me its just a brightness preference, for example I prefer to have less lighting in a room, and i usually cover my walls with posters and things to cover up the whiteness (i live in an apartment so i cant paint my walls).

Trying out your example pages, i found that while i noticed the sudden “turning on the lights” effect, there wasnt any after image, and i didnt have any feeling like i had to re-adjust my eyes to read the text. The second example is what i would probably consider as idea for a web page.

I’d be curious to know if light on dark/ dark on light preference would have something to do with how much terminal use someone has seen in the past.

For webpages I prefer reading dark-on-light, but for programming and working at a terminal I prefer light-on-dark. I think that’s because proportional fonts on web pages are hard to read in light-on-dark, because it usually hasn’t been adjusted the way you did in your second example. The monospaced fonts I use in Emacs and in my terminal emulate those weight and spacing differences simply by being monospace, making it more reasonable to my eyes.

I also have a problem with excessive floaters in my eyes, particularly a couple of permanent ones. They can be a problem on a white background where it’s easy to see them, but I can’t see them when looking on a dark background.

Since I usually sit in a darkened room (so I don’t know what time it is, so I don’t know that I should be in bed!) I find screens that are predominately white quite tiring. So I’m kinda in the light on dark camp.

That said, I Do like light-ish on dark-ish, that seems to be the optimum for me.

But as a rule, if it interests me, I read it!