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:

Pascal88 said...

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

Alexander R Pruss said...

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

El Filósofo said...

Dr. Pruss, do you watch anime?

Alexander R Pruss said...

Occasionally.

Unknown said...

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.