more colour themes (BLACK TEXT, light background)

frumbert

 The choice of a lighter grey theme is great.

But it would be nice to have a theme that has black text on a white background. I personally find that text written on a light background about 26 times more readable than light text on a dark background, which this site has had for a long time now. I find that to read long reviews and stuff I have to make the font size about 3 times larger in order not to have my eyes start watering. Yes, I'm older and had glasses for reading.  Just look at this text I am typing - so much more readable and it doesn't hurt your eyes. Except for all that dark greyness around it.

Ok it will never happen because the designer is, like, probably 11 years old and has brilliant eyesight and thinks it looks great with this itty bitty text. It's ok, I'm used to ctrl-mousewheel as soon as the site is open to crank up the size to something that isn't going to give me migraines after 3 minutes. .

klinika

I concur with the previous poster. Seems the theme got changed to almost black and white now? Occasionally, I used to get migraine (got a very very mild one, luckily) attacks from the previous color scheme, but now the contrast is much higher. Had to install a css color disabler thingie for firefox now, but lighter themes would indeed be nice. I guess mmo's just aren't for older people :P

Dana

The grey theme was originally our default and we have just today moved to the black as the default. We kept the grey in date for the reason you describe and do want to keep usability in mind. The problem is that each theme we add makes it that much harder to maintain the site's look.

That said, we'll definitely bat around a pure black on white theme and see what we can come up with. We discussed the idea of having this option within articles / forums only. So the site itself is the same everywhere, but you can hit a button and essentially "negative" the actual text screen within an article.

Thoughts?

frumbert

This would be good start - it is mostly in areas that contain a lot of text that I find difficulty reading the text. I can understand the amount of worth involved in skinning the entire site (such as the games list), but just having the option to switch over forum post backgrounds or articles to an alternate light-background based theme would be wonderful!

klinika

Sounds like a workable solution to me too, especially if the switch would be persistent throughout the session. It would be a bonus if you could select the colors to "negative" to, but just a bonus Pure white and pure black together are quite unfortunate colors because of the contrast, maybe the white could be just a tad grey? Anyways, thank you for considering such accessibility options for the site. I'm sure there are more than just the two of us with this problem, they're just shy.

Zorvan

I want blood red text on a pure black background.

Yes, it's sadistic, I know.

marinrider

The black on the white absolutly KILLS my eyes...  And it was very hard for me to read, compared to the current white on dark grey.

frumbert

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Originally posted by marinrider
The black on the white absolutly KILLS my eyes...  And it was very hard for me to read, compared to the current white on dark grey.

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heh yes it's funny what different people find hard to see. I think mine's an artefact of the glasses I wear where they put a slight coloured edge around the white text that slowly blurs my vision where as I don't see it with the black (or if I crank the font size way up).There's a little space up there already for colour themes, and one more wouldn't hurt.

Grunty

I have found many websites that use a parchment type of background color with appropriate font colors to be easily readable. Whether that style fits the MMORPG.com theme may be a different matter.