Comments on: Fix Light Text on Dark Background to Reduce Eye Strain

By: Jack

Jack — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 16:20:54 +0000

The article author is right. It hell strain my eyes and after reading that and staring away I see shadow lines in my vision. My mind then feels like orbiting and feels like to puke, some kind of migraine symptoms. It becomes a phobia. Grey won't help either.

By: Peter Clifton

Peter Clifton — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 23:11:50 +0000

Most terminals don’t use white, they use grey, to mitigate the issue. Try pure white text on a black terminal and it gets much more painful.

By: MK

MK — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:16:23 +0000

I agree with Stanley…I’m a programmer, so I work editing text 8,12, sometimes 20 hours at a time, using an editor set to light colors on a dark background, because I find this creates the LEAST eyestrain. Thus when I do a webpage I do the same thing. I do not like the very high contrast in your example tho; it would be more normal to use green or cyan. White on black is better for highlights. And by “dark” I do not necessarily mean #000000. Contrast is the real issue and it is not as simplistic or “black and white” as you put it here.

By: Stanley Leung

Stanley Leung — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:36:51 +0000

Personally I prefer light text on black background. I am quite surprised to find there are a lot of people who prefer the other way round. Most site currently have light or white backgrounds with dark or black text. It seems that the choice should be left to the users. Maybe a button on the browser that can let the users invert the color scheme easily if desired ?

By: goinglikesixty

goinglikesixty — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 14:59:02 +0000

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.