White backgrounds are far too bright

That’s why my browser, phone, and even this site have dark mode on. I’ve had a significant floater issue with my eyes for as long as I can remember. Everywhere I look, it’s like viewing everything through pond water. When looking left or right, the floaters shift in a sloshy manner but eventually return to center. It’s always been difficult to read text since the edges of the letters are blurred, with bright lights also being a challenge. Snowy days, clear skies, beaches, and white paper suck - they just remind me how terrible my vision is. Thankfully, this dark mode trend has helped out quite a bit. It’s much easier to ignore these issues when there’s not so much brightness everywhere.

I’ve struggled to use an eReader, like the Kindle, with any long-term success. It turns out there is a better dark mode-enabled eReader on the market, called the Kobo. This device is capable of converting black text to white and the white background to black, while the Kindle inverts the entire screen - including images. The Kindle makes reading in this way much more difficult.

All is not well in the Kobo universe, though. Many books include their own formatting that forces the text to be black or a specific color for emphasis or notes. Text like this won’t convert to dark mode. To fix this, we need to unpack the epub with the Calibre editor and modify the CSS.

epub_example.css

/*  Comment out color formatting for all #000 */

ul.sq li p.bull
{
	margin-top: 0.5em;
	margin-left: 0.5em;
	margin-bottom: 0.5em;
/*  color: #000000; */
}

/* If your reader supports this */
@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
  ul.sq li p.bull,
  ol.number li p.number,
  ul.n-sq li p.bull {
  color: white;
  }
}

Once all the color formatting has been commented out of your CSS file(s), save the epub, transfer it to your Kobo, and turn on dark mode. This should allow all the text to work as expected. With this fix in place, I’m able to read books again without constantly dreaming about ripping my eyes out of their sockets! Yay me!