Fix Light Text on Dark Background to Reduce Eye Strain

September 14th, 2008 | Filed under Blogging, Design, Tips.

I often encounter professional web designers who like to display light text on dark backgrounds (sometimes white text on black background), but have they ever wondered how much eyestrain it causes to the reader and how much difficult it is to read the text?

Annoyed by light text on dark background?

I really didn’t know how to echo my thoughts, till Ironic Sans provided me a way to inform webmasters that readability was an issue with their site, the eyestrain was not tolerable and keeping me away from visiting their site and reading their great content.

Try to read through the paragraph for yourself.

I don’t know if I’m seeing more and more blogs that use light text on a dark background lately, or if I’m just getting more sensitive to it for some reason, but I don’t think my eyes can take it any more. Sure, some sites look nice with that combination, but only when you first load them up. After reading a paragraph like this, the super high contrast gets to me. And the worst part is when I go to a different site and have the lingering after-image of the high contrast blog still burned in my retinas.

If you could not read through that, they provide a cool bookmarklet (drag and drop to your browser toolbar), that you can use when you encounter light text on dark backgrounds - simply click it and it will fix the site design with dark text on light background. Now that bookmarklet is a permanent addition to my tools.

Of course there are more ways to reduce computer eyestrain like increase monitor refresh rate or turn on ClearType, but this fix will surely enable me to read many more blogs.

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Comments

goinglikesixty | 14/09/08

Don’t want to make a big issue out of this, but most readability studies are based on 1. ink on paper, or 2. really rotten design (ala Ironic Sans) example.

Here is the result of a scientific study:
* Green on yellow is the best colour scheme in the most conditions - except for italicised Arial, for which it’s the worst.
* Times New Roman on average is much better than Arial. (Surprising when you consider that most usability experts recommend san-serif fonts for on-screen reading).
* The combination which gives the fastest response time is italicised (!) green Times New Roman on yellow background.
* Black-on-grey is much faster to parse than black-on-white.
http://www.metalinkltd.com/?p=91

Good design affects readability. Font, color, kerning, leading, all have an impact.