In the past several years, the general trend in web and software development has been in favor of light text on dark backgrounds, and it seems like this trend has extended to IF as well. (Partly this is because of Twine’s default CSS, but I’ve seen it a lot in games that have custom CSS and/or are not made in Twine, also.) It’s widely believed that dark-mode color schemes make it easier and less fatiguing to read large amounts of text, and to be the more accessible option for people with visual impairments, so this makes sense. The problem is that it’s not quite universally true.
I have astigmatism that’s not incredibly severe, but also isn’t quite fully correctable, so certain things can make text look blurry to me even if I have my glasses on, and having light text on a dark background is one of those things. (This is a pretty well-documented phenomenon – it’s not universal among people with astigmatism, but it’s common.) Going through the entries in IFComp 2020 and now Spring Thing 2021, there were a lot of instances where I couldn’t really appreciate a game’s content because trying to read the text was giving me a headache; I often have to take breaks, which makes it hard to really get immersed in a game, and if it’s a particularly long game it may mean that I don’t finish it. Of course, I could just say “clearly these games aren’t meant for me” and skip them, but (1) if I’m voting on and/or reviewing entries in a competition, I don’t like to skip a large chunk of entries, and (2) I would miss out on some very well-regarded games that way, which I’d be sad about.
So I was wondering what people’s thoughts were about how to address this (or if it even needs to be addressed at all). Personally, I would really like to see more games have the possibility of toggling between a light mode and a dark mode. (I’m going to try to put my money where my mouth is on this in future games, and if I can put together some CSS templates for this, I’ll probably share them.) But I do realize that this is additional effort for a bunch of hobbyists making games for free, and there’s also the question of how much a creator should have to compromise their artistic vision for the sake of accessibility. What do you all think?