Published
Dark theme: three modes in the user menu
As in the system, light or dark. The choice is kept for the member of staff and travels with them between devices, and the contrast of both themes is checked by a tool, not by eye.
The panel has always been light. For daytime work that is right, but the product is about the speed of the first response, and the panel is opened at night, in the car before a hearing and in the courthouse corridor too. A white canvas on a phone in the dark is not a matter of taste, it is a reason to close the panel.
The user menu now offers three modes: as in the system, light, dark. The default is “as in the system”: the panel follows the setting of the device and goes dark in the evening on its own, without anyone having to remember it.
The choice is kept for the member of staff, not for the device. Whoever switched the panel to dark on their phone will get dark on the office computer as well. The theme is applied before the screen is first drawn, so there is no white flash while the page loads.
A dark theme is not allowed to weaken the accessibility requirement. Every pairing of text against its own background has been calculated in advance and is checked automatically on every build; the accessibility run now covers both the light theme and the dark one. If a pairing falls short of the threshold, the build is not released.
The office colour and the status colours are readable in both themes. In the dark theme the brand colour is lightened by exactly as much as it takes for the button to stand apart from the canvas and for the label on it to be read. The office status colours have had a light value and a dark one from the start, so a status chosen by day does not disappear at night. The tone of the stage is preserved: colour carries meaning here, so only its lightness changes, not the tone itself.
- Printing is always light: a dark theme is a mode of a screen, and paper has no mode.
- The hatching on charts inherits its colour and is visible in both themes. It carries the same information as the colour does, both for black and white printing and for those who do not distinguish colours.
- The accessibility statement and the other pages outside the panel stay light.
- Email is not affected by the theme at all.
- Switching the theme is not written to the access log: the log is about access to office data, and the colour of the canvas is not such an event.
The theme is a personal comfort for the eyes rather than an office policy, so there is no setting in the panel that would fix it for all members of staff at once.
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