hootOS

HOOT_OS - V.30

Stryxnine Amity Pulsatrix
(30/🇹🇩/Saskatchewan)
NACRS Organizer
esports broadcast producer
plural, autistic, adhd
disability & queer activist
hobbyist archival researcher
bylines in Traxion.gg
loves @kadybat and @traumagotchi and @kaceydotme

57RYX9 DESIGN - Visual FX and Graphic Design North American Cohost Racing Series organizer & founder
Big Muddy Archive News


MSN Escargot
hootwheelz@escargot.chat

basica11y
@basica11y

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.


kadybat
@kadybat

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 Fools’ 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 couldn’t 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 couldn’t 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.

I’m glad they took that time—the users expressing their pain weren’t lying about it, dark mode was actively harmful for them to use. To the majority of the company their pain was incredibly easy to dismiss—and you might be quick to think, “well that’s really shitty,” 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, “well light mode gives me migraines! light theme is inaccessible for me!” Because it’s true—light 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 personal—in attempting to craft standards for a broad spectrum of needs, you can’t address each and every personal experience, and because ability is a personal experience, and everyone’s’ bodies are different, some folks are always going to need individualized options that aren’t 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 they’re highly limited, I can say from personal experience that it’s not as easy as it sounds.


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in reply to @kadybat's post:

This is totally unrelated to anything else you were saying, but - I'm so sorry you were on support during that. Must have been the worst possible time to be a public face for this.

given it took us 7 years to ship customizable color themes and even then they’re highly limited

if i'm allowed to be brutally honest, even for software development projects, 7 years sounds outrageously long, even considering the "not as easy as it sounds" part

I agree with most of what you're saying here, but I feel the need to push back on one thing:

Customizable interfaces are an accessibility feature, but not an accessibility requirement.

You can't know what any person needs for accessibility.

I understand that you're using terminology from WCAG standards, which are a good-faith compromise intended to address the majority of issues. But "feature" and "requirement" have meanings outside those standards, and every individuals needs are different.

Just because something isn't an "accessibility requirement" in the standard doesn't mean it's not literally an accessibility requirement for the person bemoaning its absence.

and when it does take so long for something like that, that's when user-created solutions are really good to fill the gap. it's one of the things i hate about the modern web how class names are intentionally obsfucated to make user styling harder (probably because it ~gets in the way of adtech~ or whatever), and it's one of the things i love cohost for the most that it is like... really good about being open to end-user modding. i don't look at class names in cohost css and go "what is this random string of characters, i just want to style a textbox" like i do on most modern websites

meanwhile discord at best has a "don't make it obvious and we won't ban you" approach to client mods like betterdiscord which are needed to make more custom themes like that for people who want to bother with DIY/community solutions, and... bluh