This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
To: "A. L. Meyers" <a.l.meyers@consult-meyers.com> Subject: Re: light on dark vs. dark on light In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 08 Mar 2001 11:27:15 +0100." <Pine.LNX.4.21.0103081124250.3093-100000@landhaus> -------- "A. L. Meyers" <a.l.meyers@consult-meyers.com> wrote: > On 6 Mar 2001, Joe Brenner wrote: > > > The second annoyance: over the years I've worked out some > > color settings that I like for emacs (I'm a big fan of light > > on dark color schemes. Brief Editorial: computer displays > > are not paper, and do not need to look like paper, please > > get that light out of my face.) xemacs comes up looking > > like netscape (strangely enough) and it isn't immediately > > obvious to me what the analog is of the functions like > > set-foreground-color. > This subject has interested me. Aside from subjective preferences do > you know any studies proving one system is less stressful for the eyes > than the other? If so, where (links)? Good question, but not one I have an answer to. My expectation is that some day some ergo expert is going to announce the amazing discovery that people can stand to look at computer screens longer if they put out less light. But I don't know of anyone actually working on this (and can't say that I've looked very hard). I just tried some websearches and came up with this, which would supposedly prove that I'm wrong: http://www.ur-net.com/office-ergo/setting.htm: SCREEN COLORS [bluespot.gif] Screen colors: dark letters on a light background. These guidelines are meant as such: guidelines. There are exceptions. The final criteria for judging the effectiveness of a visual environment is not how well it conforms to a set of rules, but rather how well it facilitates the ability of the worker to perform his or her work effectively and without injury. With the monitor off, look at your reflection in the screen. Now turn the monitor on and select a Windows-type background, (black letters on a white background). Notice that you cannot see your reflection as well. Contrast is simply the difference in brightness between two images. With a white background, we reduce the difference in contrast between the screen and what is reflected off of it. Negative screen contrast (black letters/white background) can reduce reflected images, as we saw with the demonstration. A white background also reduces the luminance (brightness) difference between the screen and the surrounding background of a normally lighted office. That makes it easier on your eyes. Most early monitor screens had a black background with white, green or amber characters. Although white backgrounds were possible, the low quality of the monitors meant that the screen would flicker noticeably. Although newer technology has reduced the necessity, there are still many software programs with dark backgrounds. Performance Bauer and Cavonius (1980) found a lower error rate, with dark letters on a white background. Snyder and his colleagues (1990) also compared black and white backgrounds. Eight out of ten subjects increased their performance by using dark letters on a light background. The improvements ranged from a low of 2.0% to a high of 31.6%. The tasks were visual search and proofreading. Except of course I refuse to believe it. They're talking about cranking up the overall screen brightness as a method of reducing glare. I use other methods (low lighting, careful placement of lighting, etc). There are a lot of variables, so a lot of it depends on what you set out to investigate (e.g. if you assume that your workers are doing keyboard data entry off of blurry carbon copies, they're going to need *really* bright room lights... I personally rarely do). ===