The madness of bright backgrounds for text on screens

I’ve created a browser extension that ensures backgrounds for text are not too bright. That’s the subject of my latest post in my tech blog: glareless.

This post is about the issues with bright backgrounds for reading.

Contents

• White background on screen is bad for reading
• Pure white as a background makes no sense
• Some coping strategies
• Better coping strategies
• The ideal fix may never come

White backgrounds on screen are bad for reading

Why is it that many text-heavy websites, among them almost all newspapers and magazines, use full 100% white for backgrounds? Perhaps they think it produces the feel of paper.
Whatever the reasoning, it’s a bad idea.

I’ve used off-white backgrounds for my websites for many years, based on some intuitive idea that 100% white was too bright. I’m not alone there. Many websites use off-white backgrounds for text. There are even articles offering suggestions for off-white hues, like this one, 15 Alternatives to Your Website’s White Background, which says:

Pure white can certainly look classy and timeless, but it can also be harsh on the eyes. The brightness of pure white creates a glare effect, which can be uncomfortable, especially when there’s a lot of it on the screen. It’s like staring into a flashlight for too long—not a pleasant experience!

Recently, while checking out fonts from the excellent Tiro Typeworks (check it out ¹), I was intrigued by how muted the background was in their font-testing areas. The background color was rgb(227, 229, 225), which is a slightly greenish gray, with 89% brightness.

I wondered what would happen if I used that background for my websites. At the time I had been using a yellowish gray with 96% brightness. Doing before/after comparisons, I was surprised to find that the text seemed darker with the background from Tiro Typeworks. How could this be?

Type designer Erik van Blokland has a good explanation, in a duo of Mastodon posts²,³:

When rays of light hit your cornea, and then your lens, through the soup of the vitreous body, and finally upsetting a photoreceptor in your retina, at every step the ray diffracts, it spreads a little. Only light does that. Darkness is the absence of light, it is created and noticed in your brain. It has no physical properties. So: light always gets bigger.

Dark shapes on a light background? The light will eat them and they shrink. Light shapes on a dark background: they appear bigger.

For dark text on light background, on screen, a bright background “will eat” the dark text. The brighter the background, the more the text shapes are “eaten”.

Serif fonts, and especially “old style” fonts, use strokes of different thicknesses in their shapes. Some areas are thinner, some thicker. A very bright background will make the thinner areas difficult to see. Many old-style serif fonts appear congested on screen, when used on a very bright background.

I didn’t like the greenish tint of the background from Tiro, but for my sites I adopted (in late 2025) a neutral gray with 92% brightness, and to my eyes, text looks more matte, closer to the feel of text on paper.

Pure white as a background make no sense

Pure white, on screen, is the brightest a screen can get. Out in the world, a white page is clearly not the brightest object you’ll see.

I wondered if I could quantify this. Camera light meters are calibrated to 18% reflectance gray, what is called middle gray.

I set up a camera on a tripod and spot-metered to my middle gray card, locked the camera exposure, and then I took a photo of a page of white paper.

While this is a very rough and informal experiment, it’s interesting to see that the brightest area of the page (bottom right corner), hovers around 95% brightness, and the middle area of the page hovers around 92% brightness.

When we use the brightest possible pixels on screen as reading background, it means that ALL photos in that screen will appear comparatively dim. Even the over-exposed areas of your photos, for example if the sun is in the shot, will just be at reading-background level. When you think of it, it’s ridiculous.

(Some) coping: blue light filters, glasses, decreased screen brightness

A lot of people who work with computers for hours on end complain of eye strain or even eye soreness as the day goes by.

There’s a cottage industry around this. In recent times, blue light from screens has emerged as a usual suspect, being accused of disrupting people’s circadian rhythms or harming their retinas.
Many people get glasses with a blue-light filter to work on their computers. Some screens offer an “eye-saver” mode which reduces the blue light from their pixels.

And some people, many people, decrease the brightness of their screen altogether.

Understandable coping mechanisms, but they all share a common problem: all content on screen will have distorted hues (if using anti-blue filters) or reduced brightness (if turning down the monitor’s brightness). Looking at photos or videos or games, or even regular pages of text with a muted background, will be a sub-par experience.
And so we get the proliferation of “picture modes” in modern monitors. I’ve had monitors with settings such as “gaming”, “vivid”, “reader”, “cinema” etc. Are we supposed to switch modes when switching activities?

Better coping: high fidelity, “themes” and dark mode

In my opinion, monitors should be calibrated for “high fidelity”, which is what we ask of audio equipment. There are some decent and free tools to help you calibrate your monitor. For example, Windows offers a screen calibrator.

Ideally, web designers would take care not to use very bright backgrounds, but if they do? Again, the browser extension I created, glareless, can help protect you from that.

Computer nerds, of course, are ahead of the curve. For a long time now, programmers have been setting up their tools (programming editors, terminals, debuggers) with bright-text on dark-background, or with “themes”, for example everforest, that offer more muted backgrounds, and generally reduced contrast between text and background.

A lot of websites and tools, and even the major operating systems, offer dark mode, which uses bright text on dark background.

Personally, I like using dark mode only in the evening. I find it less pleasant, but it’s easier on the eyes at night, when rooms are more dimly lit. Also, I think it’s good to make using computers in the evening less pleasant. Sleep hygiene and all that.
Anyway.

These are better ways of helping your eyes.

The ideal fix may never come

The WYSIWYG trend for computers has left us an inheritance of tools that use pure white background. If you use Microsoft Word, or Apple Pages, or many other “office” tools, a full-white background is forced on you. Even if you have set up dark mode in your operating system. Tsk.

I’ve created a browser extension because it’s the only thing in my purview. The ideal fix would be at the level of the operating system. You should be able to configure your OS with a settable maximum brightness for text backgrounds.

To really work, that would require all objects on screen to have metadata. All text would declare itself as text. And the operating system would always enforce the user’s wishes for a maximum allowed background brightness or for dark mode when reading text.

That may never come, but at least, the makers of office applications should honor dark mode preferences, and to hell with WYSIWYG.

In an ideal world, my browser extension would be unnecessary, because website publishers would get a clue. But I digress.