Dear WK. Yes, we need Dark Mode urgently please. The bright white colors are really hurting my eyes. That might be because i’m suffering from dry eye, but nowadays a lot of people suffer from that. Also, when working on a big monitor, it’s even worse.
Some web extensions exist but dont work that well. Please give us a Dark Mode !!
Lots of people seem to like the various dark-mode scripts, like Wanikani Breeze Dark.
Beyond that… and I’m not trying to be flippant… have you tried turning down your monitor’s brightness? If the brightness of everyday things around you doesn’t hurt your eyes, then a monitor set to similar brightness shouldn’t either.
Casual reminder to people to avoid using bright screens in poorly lit rooms/with the lights off.
May not may not be relevant, please protect your eyes people!
The only light I want to see when I’m using a computer is 1000 nits from my display
Every time I open Jira
I can’t make Wanikani Breeze Dark work on Edge, will try on Opera.
“have you tried turning down your monitor’s brightness?” - trust me, i am an expert in dimming everything as much as possible because of my sensitive eyes. However, when working on a 30 inch monitor, which i need for work, it’s difficult without a dark mode. WK background color is actually very bright, in fact which seem like an easy thing to change, just chaning the shade would make a difference actually.
“If the brightness of everyday things around you doesn’t hurt your eyes, then a monitor set to similar brightness shouldn’t either.” - afraid doesnt work like this.
In case Opera doesn’t work - Breeze Dark definitely works perfectly on both Chrome and Brave!
I feel like people who don’t work 10 hours a day reading small lines of text don’t understand how each thing helps a little. I have an Asus eye care low flicker monitor (highly recommend!), wear reading glasses with a filter for glare and blue light, and use dark mode where possible. All help reduce eye strain.
If they use SASS to generate their CSS if should be trivial to create a second palate set and generate a new css from it, then load whichever one the user prefers. I reskinned our company wiki in hot dog theme (win 3.1) colours for April fools day and it took me less than an hour, though it was a hard file swap not something users could toggle on or off, hehe. Disappointingly I waited 4 whole days before someone finally noticed!
If I am going to be on the site for a while doing a hour long review sometimes I hit 12 to open dev tools and change the body background from #eee to #000.
So yeah, if they added dark mode, I would use it.
My poet peeve though is when a site loads in normal mode, reads a setting and then switches, and you get blinded by a flash of white for a second in between. That’s even worse than there being no dark mode at all! So please wanikani, don’t do that.
I’ve been a software engineer for 25yrs, and I’ve still not seen a convincing argument that light sensitivity for most people isn’t due to incorrect brightness settings. I’ve had friendly discussions with other engineers about it, and in cases where they favored dark mode, I noticed that their monitor brightness was typically set way too high, which would definitely bother my eyes in ‘light mode’ (monitors almost always come set that way for marketing purposes).
I would genuinely like to understand the dark-mode perspective, but from the research I’ve read, I don’t think the science backs the claims (with the exception of circadian cycle, which is unrelated to eyestrain). There were some early flawed studies that failed to account for properly adjusted screen brightness. But recent, better studies show that dark mode causes your pupils to dilate more, potentially causing halation which leads to eyestrain and neurological fatigue. The biggest and most well understood factor in eye fatigue, though, has always been incorrect brightness against the screen’s surroundings.
Anyway, I’m not against dark-mode… I’m just of the opinion, until someone can give a good scientific explanation saying otherwise, that people are likely just responding to screens that are too bright.
In a way, it’s actually similar to people listening to headphones that are too loud, not realizing that today’s ultra-clean recordings mask the natural indicators when something is too loud, so they end up damaging their hearing in the long term. If you artificially add distortion to a moderately loud sound, your brain perceives it as being louder than it is. But if a very loud sound is free of distortion, you perceive it as less loud than it is.
I have an app on my phone and tablet that lets you lower the brightness beyond the factory settings, so this definitely isn’t me!
I’ve always found this weird because I have a harder time reading in dark mode most of the time because I’m straining my eyes more. The only exception is discord, where I tried light mode once and it was awful. Maybe it’s partially psychological though.
I’m a software engineer too, but I have a strong preference for dark mode. If WaniKani implements it, I’ll definitely use it.
It’s normal that pupils dilate more when viewing dark objects but constrict more when viewing bright objects. That is their function. I don’t think pupils dilating more directly leads to eyestrain; in fact, I suspect that the more they constrict the higher the chance of eyestrain because constriction requires more effort. Your pupils don’t constrict when you sleep.
I agree with you though that “incorrect brightness against the screen’s surroundings” would lead to eye fatigue. I generally have turned down my screen brightness low enough to minimize the contrast but I still prefer dark background. Based on this idea about minimizing contrast though, that means that to read more comfortably with a bright background, your surroundings need to be bright as well.
If you don’t accept the science about dark background producing less eye fatigue, perhaps you can accept that having bright background with bright surroundings would use more energy than having dark background with dark surroundings. And we all know that using less energy is better for the planet.
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