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Comment by JulianPaul | Hacker News Reader

Am I still the only one who doesn't use dark mode? My astigmatism can't take it

I use light mode in the day when it’s bright, and dark mode at night when it’s dark. Neither mode is “better” for me, but two things are true for me:

- Dark mode is harder to read when it’s bright out

- Light mode is blindingly bright when I’m in a dark room (and turning the brightness sufficiently low makes everything look washed out.)

My devices change from light mode to dark mode at sunset and it’s basically ideal.

Also it’s nice to just have less artificial light as the sun sets, which makes falling asleep naturally a bit easier.

I don't have any vision problems and still I don't get dark mode. It's harder to read. Maybe it's because I work in a bright room, but even in the evening I don't really see the point of dark mode.

It's good that it exists though. Some people have different work environments or other types of vision problems than astigmatism, and if dark mode works for them supporting it in more places is good.

Maybe we could also have a way to indicate that the user wants high contrast, but that starts becoming a lot of special cases to design for.

I find dark mode is better for astigmatism, personally. It also isn't hellish if you have floaters and migraines, unlike light mode.

The preference, either way, is an important accessibility feature.

That's so interesting! I find that the white text on a black background produces a weird, edgy blur around the edges that feels like anti-aliasing from gaming... Have you been diagnosed?

The name for this is ‘astigmatic halation’.

I wear corrective lenses largely for astigmatism. I had the lowest spherical correction until this year (now one eye moved up a click) and each eye has a different angle of cylindrical correction. I get the long-x shaped smears on street lights at night, but dramatically improved with correction. (It almost entirely goes away and looks like a slightly spiky, mostly uniform glow.)

The same blur is present for me on text on a white background...it just wasn't as apparent to me as, say, blue glowing signs at night or a microwave clock. But wearing glasses, the text is noticeably crisper and less "bold" looking. Which results in not having eye strain. The halation is still there, but it's just less obvious what's going on.

I just assumed everyone saw the same thing at night for a long time...and would never have even guessed something was off about regular black-on-white text without having an optometrist clue me in.

I didn’t used to mind “light mode”, but then flat design took over and the midtones and grays that often composed light mode were replaced by huge swaths of stark white and near-white grays which is blinding at normal display brightness and then too low contrast to work well with low display brightness. After a while of that I started to enable dark mode whenever a platform made it available.

If/when flat design goes the way of the dodo and light themes are designed sanely once again I’ll pick them back up.

I don't use it either, and find most website dark modes really difficult to read. The text blurs together or worse, it gets "burned in" to my vision briefly (not sure what that phenomenon is called). I especially dislike the ones that are pitch black instead of the cool grey/dark grey. I was hoping this "Adaptive Dark Mode" announcement was going to adaptively do away with the pitch black dark modes that make it impossible for me to read a website by adapting them to any other color scheme. =P

No, you’re not the only one, I can’t read dark mode, it’s all blurry, makes me squint and gives me a headache. Light colors all day long. Light mode is not a mode - it’s the default.

I used to be a hardcore darkmode user, but after a while it ruined my vision, I think because it's the literal opposite of the real world. Maybe people like dark mode because they keep their screen brightness really high, you just need to lower it and it is by far easier on your eyes. A good light mode theme like Solarized or Flexoki [1] will help, plus now I can retire darkreader making my browser faster and I will stop fighting with the websites' default light theme. I even started using serif font after I didn't really like them on screens, but a font made for screens with good hinting and line weight like Go Mono [2] is really beautiful and easier to read imo, Noto serif is also decent for a proportional. It's time to leave the dark side.

[1]: https://stephango.com/flexoki [2]: https://go.dev/blog/go-fonts#go-mono-fonts

For me I cannot deal with dark mode in bright environments, but equally it's fairly hard (though less hard) when using light mode in dark environments. It's why Dark Reader has been such a huge quality of life improvement for me.

No. It’s stupid. There’s a reason we don’t write white text on black paper. There’s a reason the first Mac showing black text on a white background was such an improvement.

I don’t get the point at all (and don’t want to hear it, I’ve seen the arguments before).

It’s nice it’s there for people who want it but it baffles me it’s constantly treated like the greatest thing ever.

> There’s a reason we don’t write white text on black paper.

Because wood is bright and you can’t really print white ink on a black paper?

There might be a usability advantage but using black ink on white paper doesn’t really prove that, that’s just the easier option of the two possible choices.

It’s easier, sure. Especially at first. But we’ve had paper for a while now. Different colors of ink too. If light text on dark background was superior, we would be using it. And could have for hundreds of years for anything considered important.

The playing field isn't level.

I can't buy a white pencil or ballpoint pen that works as reliably as something from Ticonderoga or Bic. White Sharpie markers do not exist. White inkjet cartridges do exist, but they're specialized items that have a high ratio of solids and this produces far worse clogging issues than the CMYK we're used to using.

I disagree, white on black could hypothetically be 5% better for the eyes and it wouldn’t be worth it to switch. If black on white were horrible for the eyes and the inverse was 10 times better, sure.

> There’s a reason the first Mac showing black text on a white background was such an improvement

Apple soon started offering a dark mode as an accessibility feature https://kalleboo.com/linked/mac_closeview_control_panel.png

That’s an accessibility feature.

It was not an intended way to use things all the time for a large chunk of the user population.

Not the same.

Yeah, just wait until you are not the target market.

Accessibility features are often the bellwether of the needs of abled users as well.

When Apple introduced Liquid Glass, "reduce transparency" was also an accessibility feature.

I use some accessibility features. I know they’re “not just for the disabled”.

But that’s still quite different to me to how people treat dark mode.

I promise you 20/30/40% of people or whatever were not using invert colors on the Mac or Windows.

> No. It’s stupid. There’s a reason we don’t write white text on black paper.

That being that black paper is more expensive than white and that we're stuck with historical precedence?

Reading white text on a black background is much, much easier for me, and the few times I've had the pleasure of doing the same with paper, I still found it to be better. I haven't tried longer texts, since nobody's publishing actual books with black paper, but I'm willing to bet it I'd feel the same about those.

This just reads to me the 'serifs are important because they make reading easier (when reading of paper)', which doesn't reflect my lived experience at all. The only reason these phenomena seem to exist are historical accident and people being used to them.

Notably, also the Xerox Alto was black on white already.

No, After a few minutes of dark mode, I get essentially zebra stripe like migraines.

Yeah same here, the only time I use dark mode is usually when I feel a migraine attack might be coming up (and I get very sensitive to light)

That's why every site should respect the user's light/dark preference when possible. Dark mode vs light mode is very divisive

I use solarized light.

Back in the day (work from office lol) people would always pick on me for that, playfully of course.

you should check https://stephango.com/flexoki

No.

Is your astigmatism uncorrectable?

Even if it were, it’s easier and more reasonable to fix your app to work with your users, than fixing your users to work with your app.

Everyone deserves configurable and hackable apps, which is the only real way to work towards universal accessibility.

I can't personally support light modes in my own software because I can't use/test them, but I'd still add an untested one and fix bug reports about it.

I'm just curious about what people mean when they talk about astigmatism in this context, because the term is usually thrown around without qualifications (plain "astigmatism" as opposed to "irregular astigmatism" or "uncorrectable astigmatism"). So I'm curious about the astigmatism of people for whom dark mode on glowing devices is a problem. Is it typically extremely severe? Is it typically uncorrectable? Is it that people's glasses or contacts are often subtly wrong/outdated? Are many astigmatics not myopic or presbyopic enough to wear glasses all the time anyway? Astigmatism is a broad category and I'm curious about the specific impairments people who avoid dark mode have, in part because I have astigmatism and nonetheless prefer (require, really) dark mode because of other vision problems.

My astigmatism is very regular, very mild, correctable, and corrected. Dark mode is still awful for me. Gives me visual snow side effects after too long and generally just makes the astigmatism symptoms worse.

It’d be great if Apple could try this hard in the iOS messages app where there the keyboard is now only dark mode when a background is set.

Yes, “irregular astigmatism”. Since it's not a uniform distortion it can't be corrected by a lens applying the inverse transformation.

Not them, but my left eye isn't fully correctable. The average dark mode site looks like I'm driving the Las Vegas strip in the rain.

Mine is, at least not completely. I had keratoconus in both eyes, one far more progressed than the other. The more affected eye has a cornea graft (essentially a transplant) which helps a lot with visual acuity, but there's still some astigmatism. And the risk/reward for the other eye means treatment isn't worth it.

I could have laser eye surgery, but I find that riskier than anything after hearing some horror stories from friends in my circle. It's not bad; I know of people who have it much worse, although experiences vary wildly, as this thread alone shows it seems

I have the opposite issue. That's why I have my system theme set to dark, and likely you to light, and this has existed for years:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/A...

It's 2026, how does every single website, especially this one, not support this?

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