Colors on your website may be a migraine trigger
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.
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Tags: chronic pain blog, pain blog, migraines, headaches, low-grade headache, headaches and migraines
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POSTED IN: Headaches/Migraines
5 opinions for Colors on your website may be a migraine trigger
Joetek
Sep 3, 2008 at 1:02 pm
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!
Eileen Gray
Sep 3, 2008 at 3:16 pm
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.
James
Sep 3, 2008 at 3:24 pm
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! ;)
Kim
Sep 3, 2008 at 5:05 pm
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.
MaxJerz
Sep 3, 2008 at 11:20 pm
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
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