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.
Well, almost all. Here's Cohost's dark mode next to its light mode for comparison:
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.
- If you use a dark mode extension for your browser, there's a strong likelihood it uses logic based on an algorithm I developed.
- Best I've found on Android is using Vivaldi with its built-in dark mode override.
- Having implemented this myself, I feel entitled to make this claim.
- 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.
If this affects you, I invite you to "like" the feature request and also leave a comment describing why it's important to you too. (Although for some reason you have to create a special account just for the feature request site before you can do that.)
