Thank you for caring
I love dark themes. All the software I use, is in dark mode, I have an extension that adds dark mode to every website I vist.
Which is why, the first thing I did when setting up this blog was to create a dark mode theme that I loved. I spent hours on coolors trying to find the thing that looked the coolest, the sleekest.
This blog is new and I kinda want to find people like me through this process. So the other first thing I did when setting this up was to figure out how to let people leave messages with links to their sites. I spent hours on Guestbooks figuring out how to set it all up. And every morning after I write a post, I look at it to see if anyone has said anything.
This morning, someone left a comment that my site is almost impossible to read. What?! My sleek, cool, rad colors?! With the night sky background and the gray pleasant text?! No way! Or maybe….way?
So I went down a rabbit whole (i’m about halfway through the rabbit hole still) learning about accessibility. If I like dark mode so much, how come others don’t? Why do I need to install extra software just to make sites look dark? Isn’t this good for everyone?
Turns out, it isn’t. And now for some technical shallow-dives because there’s no way I’m an expert in about 4 hours of researching.
There’s a guideline on how to make websites accessible and shocklingly doesn’t list ‘coolness’ as a requirements. There’s a huge document here.
Dark mode is easy on the eyes but there’s a lot that’s wrong with it. The contrasts are kinda all over the place and some people find it blurry to read pure white text on pure black backgrounds. And this is just for text. There are requirements around buttons and other interactive elements that need to stand out from the rest of the text. Sites also need to handle keyboard navigations and text readers.
After all of my investigations and spending hours flipping between color palette sites and the color contrast checker site I now have a dark and a light mode! Its just below the navigations and I hope everyone can see it because I’m not that good at programming so I fumbled around a lot trying to set this up.
All this to say, someone wanted to read my blog and couldn’t and did the hard thing of leaving a comment to fix something so they can read the thing I want them to read. They said the thing they wanted. They weren’t rude, they weren’t dismissive, they took the time out of their day to tell me that they would like to read what I’ve written but are finding it difficult. And because of that I got to learn about accessibility and can maybe help someone else learn about it too.
So Asriel, if you can read my site now - Thank you for leaving that comment. I hope the site is better now. I will continue to learn more about all of this and will try to make my website better and more readable.
And to the rest of you all, please care. Because there's always someone who needs it.