Colors on your website may be a migraine trigger
September 6, 2008 by Marijke Durning, RN
Filed under Diseases & Conditions
It can be fun to design how a website or blog will look. You get to choose colors, pattern, and design for how you want to present your information to the world.
Most sites stick to the standard lighter color background and darker color type and allow the creativity to work within that confine. But, others who want to be different, put white or light text on a black or similarly dark background as part of their design. While this may look cool to the designer and to the site owners, it can also mean pain – severe pain – to some people who live with migraines.
The white type on dark background is very difficult to read; it doesn’t come naturally to the eye. Some magazines like to start articles in this way and then continue them normally, one the white background – it’s not a new concept. But, people like me can’t read those first parts. Just those few paragraphs will cause my eyes to hurt and may trigger a migraine if I’m curious enough to try to read what the text says. With websites, it’s even faster.
This morning, someone suggested that I look at a site she wanted me to see, so I clicked on the link. Just the few seconds my eyes were on that site, black background and white type, caused that all too familiar knife-like feeling behind my left eye. I couldn’t click off the site fast enough. Thankfully, it didn’t last too long in that severe form, but I’ve had a low-grade headache for the rest of the day.
Someone once told me, just highlight the text on these sites and paste it into a word processor. That way, I’d be able to read it. But, just the time it takes for me to highlight it, my eyes have been too long on the site and the pain hits.
So, if you could just keep this in mind when choosing site colors, I know that many of us who live with headaches and migraines would be very, very appreciative.
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Image: iStock
Tags: chronic pain blog, pain blog, migraines, headaches, low-grade headache, headaches and migraines
Colors on your website may be a migraine trigger
September 3, 2008 by Marijke Durning, RN
Filed under Diseases & Conditions
It can be fun to design how a website or blog will look. You get to choose colors, pattern, and design for how you want to present your information to the world.
Most sites stick to the standard lighter color background and darker color type and allow the creativity to work within that confine. But, others who want to be different, put white or light text on a black or similarly dark background as part of their design. While this may look cool to the designer and to the site owners, it can also mean pain – severe pain – to some people who live with migraines.
Image: iStock
Tags: chronic pain blog, pain blog, migraines, headaches, low-grade headache, headaches and migraines
Thats a real issue! As a web developer, I have the Web Developer addon for Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60). This adds a quick button to “Disable Styles” which essentially displays the page with the browsers default colors (white text on black). It’s saved me a few times as I feel the headache coming on!
I agree 100%!! I try to keep the colors on my site calm. I hate when you go to a page and you just can’t read it because of the color selection.
If anyone else out there is frustrated with this, here are a couple of other options…
There’s a bookmarklet here:
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200608/light_text_on_dark_background_vs_readability/
(check the update box at the bottom of the post) which will change things to black on white for you. I just dragged and dropped it into my toolbar (test it at http://www.darkbackground.org/)
Also, if you just want dark, the Darken bookmarklet for Opera, IE and Firefox just tones everything down to greys and blacks.
If that doesn’t work – turn that machine off for a while!
Yikes – I had no idea this was a problem! Although colors don’t trigger headaches for me, I think I instinctively shy away from sites that are “busy” or, if you will excuse the expression, “psychedelic-like” in their color schemes.
This is great information.
I have the opposite problem. Sites that are black text on white backgrounds actually bother me more than white text on black backgrounds. This is due to my severe photophobia – the darker the screen and more muted the colors, the better.
Regardless, the increasing flashiness of the internet (and tv for that matter) has been a killer for my head.
Be well,
MJ