Hey LemmyRS,

I decided to try and change the style of the website to make it as accessible and appealing as I could through dev tools (inspect element).

Here are my results

Current:

After changing:

I thought this would help foster discussion on how we can improve this instance to look both appealing and accessible for supporting the most users for our growing community!

Let me know what you think!

  • AlosoEnglish
    8•1 year ago

    I really like the darker colors. But I don’t think it’s possible to change the styles of this particular instance, it would have to be implemented in lemmy-ui (and then be available to all lemmy instances).

    And note that capitalized text isn’t particularly accessible. In fact, it is harder to read than regular text, because we have a lot more practice reading regular text than capitalized text.

    • @[email protected]English
      6•1 year ago

      and note that capitalized text isn’t particularly accessible

      Yeah admittedly my “sense” in design has a ways to go. After my exams I’m hoping to read “Don’t let me think Twice”, which is apparently a really good book for UI design. Hopefully maybe i can bring in some of the good concepts from there to Lemmy too

      • DeebsterEnglish
        7•1 year ago

        In the UK, a design committee found that they shouldn’t use all-caps on road signage (the norm at the time) because it couldn’t be read at a glance

        They also designed their own font, you might have seen it:

        • @[email protected]English
          6•1 year ago

          I appreciate the example and am happy to admit this is a bad design decision regarding accessibility

          As a means of preventing any of these decisions from reaching end-users, I’ll make sure to participate in GitHub discussions before making any PRs

          Thank you for the feedback

    • @[email protected]English
      4•1 year ago

      I’m pretty sure individual lemmy instances can host their own themese, see the docs. Though notably I have never done it before, so not super sure the difficulty

    • @lightsecondEnglish
      4•1 year ago

      Do you know if communities can choose their own custom CSS?

      • stephencEnglish
        4•1 year ago

        If that were possible I would disable it, same as I did on Reddit. I want to be the one to customize the theme to my liking consistently across all communities I view, not to the liking of each individual community. Maybe what is missing are:

        • Improve the default themes
        • Custom CSS saved along with your user profile
        • AlosoEnglish
          2•1 year ago
          • Custom CSS saved along with your user profile

          You can use a browser extension like Stylus or Greasemonkey. Actually, I could create and publish a configurable userstyle if there’s demand for it.

          • stephencEnglish
            2•1 year ago

            Well sure. I use Stylebot and have already set up a few tweaks to Lemmy to my liking. But it would be more convenient to save it to my profile where it could be used no matter what device I log in with.

  • @[email protected]English
    5•1 year ago

    one of the best features of (old) reddit was the ease of customizing a communities css, and the way you could make each community you moderate its own and feel like a seperate, unique place to be

    I hope Lemmy improves on this front soon, having to fiddle with files on the backend or make pull requests to the application proper introduces a lot of friction. (not to mention I find the default theming kinda mediocre)