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Ever heard of computer vision syndrome? You probably have it. According to allaboutvision.com,More than 143 million Americans work on a computer each day, with 88% of them suffering from computer eyestrain, according to estimates. In addition, nearly 54 million children work at a computer each day either at home or in school. Prolonged computer use can stress a child's eyes and impact his or her vision development.I'm bringing this up because my eyes are a little f'd right now. I just got glasses for the first time last year (and have already lost them), and recently I've developed what I thought was some infection which was in fact just an oil gland blockage known as a chalazion (not painful, but often confused with styes which can be painful). I'm not saying the latter has to do with my computer usage, but it's not uncoincidental. It has, though, made me wonder: with the onset of internet usage exploding sometime around '95 or '96 and now entering a second decade, why hasn't there been more of a direction of making dark colored web sites with light colored text? Images obviously display a full range of colors (even grayscale, which is rendered in RGB). Light text on dark pages tends to (in my opinion) be more pleasing to the eye, especially at night. A lot of web sites are displayed to look like the printed paper (be it a newspaper or a report or what have you). With white backgrounds, the red, green and blue phosphors are being pushed to their fullest extent, which your eyes in turn have to interpret. To see just how much strain your eyes are taking from the light's emissions, wait till night, turn the lights off in your room and open spacesounds.com. Then, compare it with google. Try it looking at the sites, then turn away and look at a blank wall and flip between them. If we know this, and we know that eyes are being strained by constant internet and general computer usage, why are so many web sites still using all white screens with dark text? Some great sites (woxy.com, espn.com) are using colored backgrounds with white tables and dark text, which I think is a nice compromise, but most of the familiar sites (google.com, cnn.com, nytimes.com) are mostly white with dark text. Why is that? We're all going to be blind! |
