Switch Your Devices to Dark Mode to Give Your Eyes a Break

THIS ARTICLE, LIKE most of the internet, is presented to you via black text on a white background. Depending on what time of day it is, and how long you have been staring at an obnoxiously bright screen, you might find the experience of reading it a bit … aggravating. Perhaps even exhausting. Don’t worry, you’re not alone.

While WIRED is, of course, a beautifully designed site, we spend most of our day staring at bright white screens dotted with colored words and images, and it can quickly take a toll on our poor old eyes. Nearly 60 percent of the American adults surveyed by the Vision Council, which represents members of the optical industry, reported experiencing symptoms of digital eye strain.

Enter dark mode. Oft referred to as night mode, high contrast, or inverted colors, the setting has grown popular with those who claim to experience eye fatigue from a deluge of white screens. Dark mode is an eye-friendly alternative to the traditional blindingly bright user interfaces sported by most apps, sites, and platforms. Instead of featuring a predominantly white background with black text, the typical dark mode displays a black background with white or colored text, making it easier to, say, read your own tweets silently to yourself at 3AM without feeling like you’re staring directly into the sun.

It’s difficult to pinpoint when exactly our rebellion against blinding white screens began. Over the years, many popular apps, sites, and operating systems have released darker versions of their traditional themes and layouts in an attempt to satiate light-averse users and make products more accessible to the visually impaired. Technically, it’s not rebellion at all, but more of a throwback. The displays of early user terminals and personal computers in the 60s and 70s bear a stark resemblance to the predominantly black high-contrast themes popular today.

One of the first modern operating systems to offer a darker alternative to the black-on-white theme was Apple’s System 7 OS, which debuted in 1991, and featured an inverted color scheme for the visually impaired. Named CloseView, the optional accessibility program allowed users to toggle between the traditional black-on-white theme and a more moody white-on-black one. Similarly, Windows 95 boasted a High Contrast toggle that did basically the same. Windows XP, released in 2001, featured multiple high-contrast themes and the option to change the color of the user interface, which allowed for a more natural appearance that isn’t much different than the few well-designed dark modes of today.