CUNY Academic Commons

Adding Scott as a watcher. Scott, have you heard of tools like this? I'm skeptical that it would work well across themes, but perhaps you've tested something like it in the past, or could give this one a brief look?

Just wanted to chime in that such tools might be good for people with (developing) cataracts.

Raffi, do you want to enable a dark mode option for your site for other visitors or just yourself? If for yourself, there are many browser extensions that offer an artificial dark mode. I use Dark Background and Light Text on Firefox myself.

It would be better if the WordPress theme in question supported a native dark mode though.

Raymond Hoh wrote in #note-3:

Raffi, do you want to enable a dark mode option for your site for other visitors or just yourself? If for yourself, there are many browser extensions that offer an artificial dark mode. I use Dark Background and Light Text on Firefox myself.

Hey Raymond. I also use a browser extension, but I was thinking about for visitors.

I think that visitors most prone to light sensitivity (like both of us) would already seek out solutions and be using a dark mode browser extension, but that's just my opinion. It also looks like the WP Dark Mode plugin is using the Dark Reader browser extension for the core of its functionality.

If the rest of the team thinks it is worthwhile to add WP Dark Mode or a similar plugin, then I'd consider it. However most dark mode plugins I took a look at on wordpress.org have upsells and I'd prefer a plugin that did not have that.

I think that Ray makes a pretty good point. Like so many accessibility and accessibility-adjacent tools, it's frequently the case that users who need the tools already have client-side, purpose-built solutions that are better than the typical off-the-shelf tools that websites can provide. Unless we found a really great tool (no upsells, excellent compatibility with other Commons tools, etc) we might be better-off letting users solve this at the browser level.

I think this is an area where using a Block Theme would be advantageous. There's a plugin that can help with generating a dark theme and adding a menu item to toggle the dark mode. See https://github.com/mosne/mosne-dark-palette.