Friday, June 4, 2021

Chrome extension: Blacker Text

Web design has opted for dark grays as opposed to blacks. For a middle-aged person like me, this makes things less pleasant (and perhaps harder, but I don't have the empirical data to show that) to read: the grays not only look dimmer, but also fuzzier to me. So I wrote a simple Chrome extension that automatically snaps near-black colors to black (and near-white to white, for use on dark-mode sites) on all websites, except within links. You can adjust how close you have to be to black (or white) to snap. 

Update: Here is the FireFox version.

The result of using this extension for the last week has been a pleasanter web experience: a lot of sites look crisper, more like reading a book printed with high quality ink on high quality acid-free paper. I miss it on my phone since mobile Chrome doesn't support extensions (I am tempted to switch to a mobile browser that does support extensions, but haven't done so yet).

Eventually, if there is any actual interest in the extension from people other than myself, I may add some per-site options in case some site is broken by this. 

5 comments:

  1. I’m not even near being middle-aged but I do prefer black text over gray so thanks for the extension anyway.

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  2. There is, however, some research that dark gray reduces fatigue over black: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272409319_The_Study_of_Visual_Fatigue_by_Monitor_Letter_Contrast_with_an_Eye_Tracker

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  3. Dr. Pruss, this is unrelated to the post but how do you reply to people who claim that philosophical arguments for example are not actual evidence or proof that God exist.

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