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Comment by yeukhon | Hacker News Reader

Two questions:

To those who are color blind, how do you overcome color blind in software? Do you guys have software to help changing color on your computer? Should and will Firefox address that kind of problem?

Nightly defaults to the dark theme. I like old white theme. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=947242 why do we choose the dark theme over the white theme? I am not color blind but I use computer typically between 12-18 hours. Who made that decision? Can we make the white theme default again? I honestly don't think the dark theme helps reading. If anything, the dark theme hurts me viewing.

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I'm not severely colorblind, but I'm red/green colorblind, and I hope I can help you out.

I don't use software to change color on my computer--there's nothing that I can change it to that will look more like whatever y'all see it as--I just simply can't see that color. I've lived with my colorblindness for three decades, so it's not like I'm trying to get used to it still. Sometimes the contrast is off on things, and I'll try to correct it manually, but there's nothing that I can do to make me see a color that's physically impossible for me to discern.

I rely on hex codes a lot, and I do my best to develop UIs that I can navigate with ease, and won't hurt others that are colorblind. For example, whenever I see red (255,0,0) text on blue (0,0,255), or vice versa, it physically hurts my eyes.

Really the only thing that reminds me I'm colorblindness day-to-day is folding laundry. My wife color-coordinates her clothes in her closet, so when I hang them up, it's a crap shoot. She often comes to me with a new article of clothing and says, "So I can find this later, what color do you think this is?" I'm usually wrong. C'est la vie.

Thanks for the comment, we always try and cater to as many of our users as possible. If you've used our tools, are there particular areas that cause more trouble than others? Do you find the dark or light theme easier to navigate (available in Nightly builds right now)? Would love to hear how our tools can be improved in this regard! Feel free to email me at darrin[at]mozilla.com if you'd rather not post on HN.

We (I am the author of that post) definitely care about color blind users and want to make our tools as usable for as many people as possible! Photoshop allows you to simulate varieties of color blindness and we keep that in mind. We are also trying to provide better visual cues, like shapes/textures rather than relying solely on colors. The network panel in nightly for example has shapes to indicate HTTP response codes.

Secondly, once you switch to the light theme (available in the options pane of nightly) it should persist for you, so it will become your "default".

Yes, the current dark theme does not have high enough contrast. There is a bug opened to switch to higher contrast colors in the dark theme here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=971418 (and this will likely be uplifted to Aurora after landing).

There is a light theme in Aurora right now.

FWIW, I'm colorblind and I use and prefer the dark theme.

Also, (warning this gets a little hand wavy) most pages on the web are light, so the light theme blends in. It is useful to have that contrast by default. Easier to make a distinction visually, and also "self xss" is deterred a little because the devtools are more obviously not part of facebook or whatever.

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