I'm a Systems Reliability and DevOps engineer for Netdata Inc. When not working, I enjoy studying linguistics and history, playing video games, and cooking all kinds of international cuisine.
People tend to prefer one of a dark theme (like DEV's dark theme), a black theme (as in true black for the background, with off-white and other colors for text, which is the only type of dark theme that actually saves battery life on OLED screens), or a light theme. I've met very few people who actually like the auto-switching based on time of day or ambient light that some OS developers are implementing.
The reality is that for most people, one type of these themes is significantly more readable than the others. For people with 'normal' vision it's usually dark text on a light background. For some people like me though it's black themes (in my case it's a result of the interaction between my ocular astigmatism, nystagmus, light sensitivity, and other vision anomalies), and for some it's dark themes with lower contrast than black themes.
The best approach to dealing with this is simple: Try to use whatever they have their OS configured for by default (using the CSS prefers-color-scheme media query), default to a light theme if you can't do that (more people seem to be fine with a default light theme than a default dark theme), and let the user override the theme choice persistently.
People tend to prefer one of a dark theme (like DEV's dark theme), a black theme (as in true black for the background, with off-white and other colors for text, which is the only type of dark theme that actually saves battery life on OLED screens), or a light theme. I've met very few people who actually like the auto-switching based on time of day or ambient light that some OS developers are implementing.
The reality is that for most people, one type of these themes is significantly more readable than the others. For people with 'normal' vision it's usually dark text on a light background. For some people like me though it's black themes (in my case it's a result of the interaction between my ocular astigmatism, nystagmus, light sensitivity, and other vision anomalies), and for some it's dark themes with lower contrast than black themes.
The best approach to dealing with this is simple: Try to use whatever they have their OS configured for by default (using the CSS
prefers-color-scheme
media query), default to a light theme if you can't do that (more people seem to be fine with a default light theme than a default dark theme), and let the user override the theme choice persistently.That's a great answer I need, many thanks!