Why? What changed? And what happened to the acidic light?
First, welcome!
This is my new site. Lots has changed. There’s a new domain name (ritchie.page replacing acidiclight.dev), a refreshed look, a new layout, and…what the fuck… is that…my eyes…a light theme!?
Elephants in the room
If you’re used to my old website, and the Socially Distant site, always having a dark theme, then coming to this page may have been a surprise. If it’s still dark, then that’s great - you are using a browser that respects desktop preferences.
Several months ago, I was asked by other blind users about adding a light theme to the site. While I can’t read light themes, others with different vision impairments can’t read dark themes. At the time, I wasn’t sure how to go about implementing that.
Browsers tell websites to be dark now
Modern web browsers now inform websites of the user’s dark preference. This comes from your current system theme. I use Breeze Dark on my Plasma systems, therefore all websites I go to should be dark. Are they? No, not always. But at least this one is.
You can still change it.
If you prefer having a dark theme on my site but not on your system, click the little icon in the very top right corner of the page. It’s labelled “Toggle dark mode” for you wonderful screen reader users, but for everyone else, it’s the icon that looks like a half-filled circle with a pointy thing. Click that, and the site will switch between dark and light mode. This setting is saved locally.
I don’t like how it works.
For the devs reading this, browsers expose dark mode preference via a CSS media query. This is fine, until you want to test the site you’re working on in a theme that isn’t your system theme. I have accessibility needs, my OS must be in dark mode or I cannot use the computer, I am not changing my system theme just to view my site in light mode.
Chromium lets me emulate different theme preferences in dev tools, but the setting is buried and isn’t persistent (it resets as soon as dev tools closes). This is genuinely a problem. Please fix it, browser devs!
The new domain
Yep. I snagged ritchie.page. I decided to use this as my new domain name because it’s more personal to me. I still have, and will keep, acidiclight.dev since I will be using it as a place to host information about my own projects. Not all my stuff needs its own website, so https://acidiclight.dev/ will be where those things go. For now, it’s an archive of my old site.
New Domain, New Name
I have decided to split my identity from that of acidic light. My name is Ritchie, and everything on this website is related to me and myself only. My studio name is acidic light, in reference to the extreme painful photo-sensitivity my blindness causes. If I were to start a game development company, it would be called acidic light.
Site changes
Now let’s talk about the changes I’ve made to the site’s design and layout.
Enough with the blue
The avatar shown throughout this site is named Ritchie, just like me. His eye color is blue. That’s the only blue I want on this site. Blue is everywhere on the Internet nowadays, and quite frankly I’m bored of it. Blue feels corporate, and seeing it all over the user interface of every website on the web makes the web feel like a sad place. I mean, it is, but my part of it doesn’t have to be.
My favorite color is red. I generally wear red clothing, I keep my Plasma accent color set to red, my IDE themes generally have red-leaning syntax highlighting, my GitLab is red, my KDE Invent is red, everything I use is red. I see red when I’m pissed off about accessibility issues, I like writing about said issues in a text editor that has a lot of red borders. So… I made the site a lot more red.
Links are red now. That’ll annoy some people, but you still know they’re a link and that’s the point.
Headings are now bright red (they look yellow to me) in dark mode and red in light mode.
When you hover over a menu item, it turns red. When it’s active, it turns red.
The mobile menu is also very much red. Seriously, even in light mode, the background is an off-white with a hint of red. Red is everywhere on this site and I am proud.
Skeletons in the closet
That heading is a clever way of saying I stole some design elements from Hari Rana (TheEvilSkeleton)‘s site. My favorite part of their site is the flashing text cursor and fake terminal prompt used to display page titles. So…guess what my titles also do. :)
Minimally cyberpunk, Minimally ugly
I’ve kept the Cyberpunk font for headings because I like the font. Other than that, I have subdued a lot of the terrifying what-the-fuck parts of my old site. Bright-colored backgrounds are completely gone, because I feel the site looked tacky with them.
Headings are now all-caps. This helps visually distinguish them from paragraph text without the font size needing to be so giant. This makes them feel slightly less tacky. Nope, that’s no longer the case. This issue points out that, while they were in deed distinguishable from paragraph text, different heading levels were hard to distinguish unless you’re zoomed into the screen like I almost always am. I’ve addressed this by adding a border to h2 headings, making h3 smaller, and making h4 through h6 (which I rarely use anyway) all-caps. I’ve also fixed the font weight of headings, it was done incorrectly. Oops.
I am also experimenting with using borders to separate major parts of the site. Did you notice the dashed orange border separating the navigation bar from the rest of the page? That’s what I mean.
Your eyes matter to me
Vision is important, not everyone has it. I’m not great at designing light themes, but I hope I did a decent job.
Part of why light themes are hard for me to read is that we as a society have decided all light themes must have white backgrounds. If you think that’s how it should be, I want you to go take a picture of a piece of paper in a well-lit room and tell me if the paper is actually as white as you think your entire desktop environment should be. In reality, off-whites are more natural. They’re also - get this - easier on my eyes, so likely yours as well.
For the dark mode, I’ve gone with a near-black background where the content matters. Gray backgrounds are not nearly as friendly to blind users in need of dark color schemes, and I feel you shouldn’t need to go full high contrast mode to get decent contrast.
Future Plans
In the future, there’s a few things I want to implement going forward.
High Contrast support
If people really need high contrast, then I’m not going to let the browser try to half-ass a theme for you. I can actually figure out if high contrast is requested by the user, so I want to use that media query to make things even easier to see.
Image descriptions
This build of the site already has support for image descriptions where it matters. I want to go back and retroactively assign image descriptions to old posts. Even if the image is just a KDE logo that I can see perfectly fine, screen readers should still be able to see it and read “KDE logo.”
Let me know what you think
This site doesn’t have a comment system, nor will it ever. But I do want to hear what you think of the design. You can submit issues and contributions on my GitLab.