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Hermit in the Highrise

born 1990. very skittish. i play fighting games and randomizers. i also like to tinker a lot.


arachnixe
@arachnixe

Disability Pride Month has come and gone, and all it seems to do for me is provide a reminder of all the ways accessibility gets dismissed and deprioritized. Now I'm not The Accessibility Advocate, and I'm not able to enumerate all the ways this site can improve on its accessibility, but I wanted to talk about an accessibility feature that embitters me toward Cohost. It's one that Cohost almost implements, but so poorly it's completely useless to me.

Dark Mode

This is not a purely aesthetic feature—for some of us it makes a huge difference! I suffer from chronic migraines, and staring at a bright screen for a significant period of time triggers them reliably.

This used to be an even bigger burden for me, back in the Bad Old Days before most software and websites supported dark mode. I spent huge chunks of my free time for years working on special scripts and custom software to allow me to use my computer without suffering1. And then, over time, the culture changed, and dark mode became nearly ubiquitous. I can go on all my social media apps and enjoy a mostly pain-free browsing experience.

A screenshot of the Twitter app's dark mode. The background is a dark blue-gray, and the text is light-colored. The screenshotted tweets are mine and the text is not important for the sake of this post; it's only included to illustrate the color scheme.
Twitter
A screenshot of the Bluesky app's dark mode. The background is a black, and the text is light-colored. The screenshotted posts are mine and the text is not important for the sake of this post; it's only included to illustrate the color scheme.
Bluesky
A screenshot of the Tumblr app's dark mode. The background is a dark gray, and the text is light-colored. The screenshotted posts are mine and the text is not important for the sake of this post; it's only included to illustrate the color scheme.
Tumblr

Well, almost all. Here's Cohost's dark mode next to its light mode for comparison:

A screenshot of the Cohost's light mode. The background is almost stark white, and the text is dark-colored. The screenshotted posts are from staff and the text is not important for the sake of this post; it's only included to illustrate the color scheme.
Cohost Light Mode
A screenshot of the Cohost's dark mode. The background is almost stark white, and the text is dark-colored. The only difference between this and the light mode is that the line separating posts is dark here. The screenshotted posts are from staff and the text is not important for the sake of this post; it's only included to illustrate the color scheme.
Cohost Dark Mode

Can you see why this might be profoundly disappointing to someone who relies on dark mode? It almost looks like a bad joke at my expense. They've gone halfway there, implementing light mode and dark mode detection... but only applying the relevant styling to decorative page elements rather than to the posts that I'm trying to read!

I'm thankful for the folks putting in their own free labor to try to remedy the problem, such as using browser extensions to implement custom styling just for Cohost, but even if you assume volunteers will keep this up forever (and I do not), these kinds of solutions are desktop-centric. Phone browsers don't broadly enjoy the same extensibility, and you might notice that all my screenshots are from a phone because that's almost exclusively the device I use social media with.

Are there workarounds? Yes2, and all of the ones I've found are a hassle that puts the burden on the tech-savvy users with disabilities to figure out. It's unfair and it's also perfectly typical.

And the most frustrating part is that this is not a difficult feature request3, especially since Cohost already has different CSS for light and dark modes! It just needs to be extended to include the things that actually matter. Yes, yes, arguably there are weird edge cases4 to applying theming to user posts, especially given the unpredictable custom CSS that users do, but let's be real: at least 99% of posts will look just fine if you set a different default background/foreground color. Feel free to use the custom Cohost styles linked above to see for yourself.

It doesn't need to be perfect, but with probably less than a day's work staff could make something that dramatically improves the status quo here. Hell, if you're feeling sassy (and with, admittedly, more work) you could expose a pre-defined set of color variables for the custom CSS folks to enjoy, or even allow posts to media query prefers-color-scheme to handle their crimes in more accessible ways. Those would be great! But today I'd just appreciate having a real dark mode with which I could read most posts on my phone.


Addendum: I've been informed that there's a place you can submit feature requests. Frustratingly, you have to sign up for a support account that is entirely separate from the account for the site it's supporting, but if you do so, you are rewarded with the opportunity to "like" the feature request for a real dark mode. It's labeled as "planned," but it's also been sitting there for 9 months, so I'm not sure how long to hold my breath. Better yet than "liking" it, if you care to, write a comment explaining how it affects you.


  1. If you use a dark mode extension for your browser, there's a strong likelihood it uses logic based on an algorithm I developed.
  2. Best I've found on Android is using Vivaldi with its built-in dark mode override.
  3. Having implemented this myself, I feel entitled to make this claim.
  4. Believe me when I say that I can appreciate the challenges these edge-cases bring and why someone might obsess over the perfect 100% solution. See 1.

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in reply to @arachnixe's post:

On android I use the Iceraven Firefox fork because it allows you to install firefox addons such as userscript managers or userstyle managers. I use this app FFupdater to auto-install updates for it too. I know suggesting a bandaid solution isn't the nicest, but it's what I'm able to do right now :)

If you use a dark mode extension for your browser, there's a strong likelihood it uses logic based on an algorithm I developed.

i am guessing this includes dark reader, which is funny, because:

Best I've found on Android is using Vivaldi with its built-in dark mode override.

as far as i can tell it uses dark reader under the hood, because the results i get with dark reader on desktop and vivaldi's dark mode on android look so suspiciously familiar that i'm sure that this is dark reader. so you might have indirectly contributed to vivaldi lol

I can't tell you how nice it is to release an open-source algorithm into the wild and then watch other people take it and use it and then maintain it forever afterward. :-)

But realistically, I can't say for sure that it's descended from my work, but when it does fail to do the expected thing on some edge cases, it fails in exactly the way my original version did over a decade ago.

I appreciate it, but honestly you should thank the folks maintaining whichever extension you use. The base algorithm is the (relatively) easy part...maintaining an implementation of it through all the wild bullshit Google has put us through with their rendering engine quirks: that's the hard part, and the reason I'm content to let others take the credit (and the maintenance burden).

Several days ago I thought, 'I wonder if cohost has a dark mode'. Then I found out it was already turned on, and got Real Mad - black text on white background just isn't a dark mode??? It simply is not! It's not just a bad joke! It's a lie!!
Would a real dark mode mess up some css crimes? Yeah probably idk. Would I rather have a legible website 90% of the time? Absolutely, cohost is the least pleasant screen I have to look at.
I am not the kind of person who can "implement workarounds" on mobile, so instead this is just a point where cohost sucks for me.

ive had this exact same complaint since i started using the site - it's something i need in order to browse almost any website i use... and like you said, having to use an external tool to fix what they already have half-heartedly started to fix is annoying! and having to make another account to complain about it is even more annoying. ach.

in any case, hopefully this puts some pressure towards dark mode being actually dark mode rather than "dark-light mode" lol

After I had PRK I had to use this site and every other light-only site with Vivaldi's built in invert tool because it was so physically painful to look at even a vaguely bright screen for like two months. Luckily in my case the situation was temporary but dark mode as an accessibility feature is no joke.

It's also worth remembering that Cohost Staff is, like, 5 people who insist on working reasonable hours and not letting themselves become the typical crunch-riddled overworked tech company. I'm sure they do have it planned, but they also have a million other things on that list.

wait i didn't realize bright screens could trigger migraine /flop

well i also have mild astigmatism that doesn't require me to wear glasses but is just bad enough so everything glows for me in dark mode... and glasses strains my eyes greatly too; so basically a dilemma for me ><

It sounds like you might benefit from low-contrast themes—either light-gray-on-dark-gray or dark-gray-on-light-gray. Though that can also be a balancing act to ensure the contrast is low enough to reduce eye strain without being so low that you strain to distinguish characters from the background color.