Published on 12, July, 2020
As has been much commented on since the re-vamp of the forum, the colours and bright background can be a bit much for some of us. I had tried a few different web-browser extensions in the past to try to overcome this for this site and others that I struggle with, and I now seem to have found a couple which are both reliable, easily tweakable, and totally free.
I'm not sure if It's OK to link these here, but they are both non-commercial open-source software, and free unless you choose to donate. I have no connection to the producers other than as a user, and I really do find them very useful, as I think many others with light sensitivities might do; so hopefully the mods will deem it OK.
Dark Reader
Unlike many others, it doesn't just invert the colours for a dark background, which often looks really awful, and doesn't work if the background is already dark! It has a very clever algorithm that keeps as much of the existing colour theme as it can, but tries to make the background dark, and everything else show up against the background. You can even turn it on and off, and control the brightness, colour saturation, etc. automatically for individual websites (great for toning down that hideously livid purple!) As I say, it's totally free, and is available for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. I've been using it now for a few weeks, and it seems very reliable. It's only fair to say that there is a down-side; websites will load a bit slower while it does its magic on the colours, more so when the page is very complex, and it doesn't always work well for images that have a transparent background. But on the whole, it's made my browsing experience far more comfortable!
f.lux
This one looks at your computer's clock, and slowly changes the screen colour so that it becomes less blue around sunset, and back again at sunrise - so that the light from your screen is a better match for how natural daylight changes over the day. This should help avoid eye-strain, and may help with the problem of blue light from screens messing with sleep patterns. Unlike the other one, this is an application that works for the whole screen with all applications, though you can exclude particular programs when you do need accurate colours (e.g. photo editing software). I've found that it really does help to relieve eye-strain when using the PC in the evening (though sadly, to little effect on my sleep - though, of course, YMMV!) It's available for most platforms, including many smart-phones.
Of course, I encourage people to make a donation to the programmers if you find them useful and have the money - these are both very well thought out bits of software that will have taken a lot of work to produce, and it's very generous that they're available for nothing.
Trogluddite said:As for your own recommendations and experiences with Dark Reader - the more the merrier! There's no doubt in my mind that different solutions will suit different people and computer environments, and I've yet to find any solution which doesn't involve more compromises that I'd really like to make.
Agreed. Our views on Dark Reader are very similar. We agree the add-on is very good but slow and it is only the degree of performance in which we differ.
I also agree with your middle paragraph.
First of all, I would like to highlight that I believe it is NAS' responsibility to produce a site which is not so bright: we, as users, should not be having to find solutions. The subject of this topic should catch NAS' eye and I would like to know what they are doing to resolve the situation.
Yes, I totally agree, and I should have made clearer in my post that I see these solutions only as pragmatic stop-gaps. It really shouldn't be necessary for us to debate less-than-perfect work-arounds for these problems.
I think that equal access for people with disabilities is pretty woeful on the internet generally; eye-candy to attract clicks has definitely taken priority over careful organisation and accessibility features for far too long, and organisations like the NAS should be leading the way. As I pointed out in the thread about the forum changes, there are plenty of good examples of sites which allow simple customisation of colours and font sizes, and that should have been a major consideration during the re-design.
As for your own recommendations and experiences with Dark Reader - the more the merrier! There's no doubt in my mind that different solutions will suit different people and computer environments, and I've yet to find any solution which doesn't involve more compromises that I'd really like to make.
Making a site work for it’s user base should be high in the agenda, without users it will suffer.
We are the people who welcome new comers, try our best to help where we can. NAS pop in now and then to remind us they “work’ on behalf of us!
Usually Only to post up links to fixed NAS resources, why can they not post links to other well known resources?
Or to tell us off for being adults, this site does not allow youngsters so the odd descriptive word shouldn’t cause to much concern.
One thing they don’t do is Notice posts regarding SUICIDE,
Maybe if many expletives are used it might just get a mention?
Although I have seen edited replies to a member trying to help an individual talking of ending it all, no mention of help to the person struggling, just watch your language below the original post.
Requests were made as soon as the upgrade was implemented, small adjustments have been made but still no overall fix.
I used Dark Reader for a short time and found it to be very good but it is painfully slow. It takes Firefox back to its pre-Quantum update and, for my usage, is not practical. I understand that a performance enhancement was/is being worked on and Dark Reader certainly needs such an enhancement. Some people may find the speed (or, rather, lack of speed) acceptable.
For initial topic postings I use Firefox's built-in reader view (when an icon looking like a sheet of paper appears in the address bar, clicking the icon will take Firefox into reader view). I find this a better solution than Dark Reader for general web use, however, the reader view does not work with multiple posts in a topic.