Disclaimer
This is not an excuse to bully or deride requests for communication and progress on accessibility needs. Do not tone police people asking for these things, please.
Dark Mode and Accessibility
"Dark Mode" in specific is not something covered by most accessibility guidelines directly, because there is very much no one-size-fits-all design criteria. In general, you should be making it possible for users to personalize the styling of your website (or software) to fit their needs. As long as you are not blocking users from being able to make those changes, you have done your duty from a legal and international standard perspective re: Dark Mode.
Of note: providing your own dark mode can actually be an issue, because you are now responsible for making it work with all color-related success criteria in addition to whatever the default theme for your site is.
Customizable interfaces are an accessibility feature, but not an accessibility requirement. For some, dark modes are actively harmful too.
I was already at Discord when we pulled a rather infamous April Foolsâ prank where we discontinued the light theme. Like, pulled it from the app for a full week. We rode that bit.
And people screamed. People screamed a lot. I still worked in customer experience at the time, I would know, I was fielding a lot of the anger. And of course I couldnât meaningfully do anything about it, but users would yell and scream and tell me that I, personally, was causing them to have unending migraines and eye strain and that I worked for an ableist company and that if I couldnât flip a switch to magically bring back light mode right now then I was clearly doing harm towards disabled individuals.
Bolstered by user outcry, a few folks on the design and engineering teams crunched to make a better light theme. They did it in their spare time, because they thought it needed doing. They crunched, we shipped it, the outcry stopped. But they were 4 or 5 folks out of 200, and they were doing this at 10PM, 11PM at night, during an already-crunchy period for us.
Iâm glad they took that timeâthe users expressing their pain werenât lying about it, dark mode was actively harmful for them to use. To the majority of the company their pain was incredibly easy to dismissâand you might be quick to think, âwell thatâs really shitty,â but hang on now.
When we pulled light mode from the app, the outcry was met with positivity from those who found our light mode to be utterly unusable. Both internally and externally. When I saw user pain about light mode dismissed, it was from a place of, âwell light mode gives me migraines! light theme is inaccessible for me!â Because itâs trueâlight themes on software do cause migraines and eye strain for some just like dark themes on software can cause migraines and eye strain for others.
This is precisely why WCAG has not codified light vs dark in its guidelines. WCAG standards are designed to address the broadest possible group of needs using data-driven standards that make it easier for folks across the ability spectrum to use software. The trouble is that ability status is immensely personalâin attempting to craft standards for a broad spectrum of needs, you canât address each and every personal experience, and because ability is a personal experience, and everyoneâsâ bodies are different, some folks are always going to need individualized options that arenât necessarily possible or easy to standardize or implement at scale.
The fix there, of course, is offering customization and the ability for someone to drive, but⊠given it took us 7 years to ship customizable color themes and even then theyâre highly limited, I can say from personal experience that itâs not as easy as it sounds.



