TIL: Dark mode causes eye strain

For a few years I used dark mode because i thought it was better for your eyes; it isn’t.

When in dark mode, you’re looking at an overall darker screen, your pupils will dilate to let in more light, which makes everything just outside of focus very blurry, and gives the text a halo effect. A few minutes will be fine, but anything longer is going to make your eyes begin to strain.

When in light mode, your pupils contract to accommodate for the light, this is how our eyes are supposed to work, this is going to be less straining on your eyes. In low light environments, simply turn down the brightness and apply a night light filter.

If you’re going to use dark mode regardless, don’t use AMOLED unless it’s for saving battery. The contrast between bright white and pitch black is the worst combination. Consider using a soft grey, your eyes will thank you.

Source

BenHM3,

Focusing your eyes (and to a lesser extent, adjusting your iris to changing brightness) is like making a fist.

In a day’s reading, that’s happening about 30,000 times. Bit of a strain. What can we do to cut down that number or lessen the amount of muscle-force needed? Keep your irises closed down. Happens in photography all the time. Small iris-openings means a wider depth-of-field. Focused for 1m, with a small iris setting, objects at .5 and 1.5m might appear sharply focused. A really wide-open iris setting, and suddenly only objects at .9 to 1.1m are in focus.

Your eye sweeps the page/screen as you read a line. It’s unlikely that surface is perfectly curved so every letter is exactly the same distance from your eye, so a little focusing might be needed from the left, through the middle, to the right of the line. (That’s where they came up with the 30k estimate.)

So if we could pick an ideal, minimal iris opening to minimize that re-focusing during the scan, wouldn’t it be easier on our eyes?

And how do we get that minimal iris opening? With a brighter average scene. Light mode. Or perhaps “light-ish mode.” As many people have pointed out, extremes aren’t our friends. But we need contrast to read, we just don’t need it to be at 11 all the time.

YMMV. @HousePanther, you might need glasses. Strain=bad, but cyclical strain vs steady-state strain might be worse. You do you, I’m sticking with white or light backgrounds.

soulifix,

I’ve been using the internet a long time before dark mode was a thing. I’ve served my time by dealing with too much white, everywhere, that blinds me whenever it came up suddenly.

MedicPigBabySaver,

No. This is crap.

eh,

Light mode only "clicked" for me when I set my monitor's brightness all the way down. If you're getting "flashbanged" turn that brightness down. It helps (or maybe my monitor is just really fucking bright)

Except Discord which somehow manages to have the worst light theme ever created by mankind. I have no idea how anyone can use light mode without going mad. Everything else's fine.

housepanther,
@housepanther@lemmy.goblackcat.com avatar

Dark mode actually makes my eyes relax and I feel less prone to headaches and eye fatigue.

ggnoredo,

That’s why you need to use night light feature which make color warmer

Wizza,
@Wizza@lemmy.zip avatar

That does work to lower the strain in your eyes (coming a person that has had one in their phone for years now) but as far as i know, that is mostly meant to lower the amount of blue light coming from your display, as to not affect your sleep cycle

edit: typo

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