High contrast theme accessibility issues with some extension menu background colours

corruleum

I have a computer (Win7 ~~yes I know it's outdated~~) with high contrast mode enabled, and have just updated Vivaldi to the latest version (3.3.2022.47).

As mentioned in this post on a now-locked thread (never really brought up again in that thread), Vivaldi now treats high contrast themes' background colour as the default for unspecified backgrounds, where formerly it had defaulted to white. Without changing the page text's colour. Black on dark grey is not readable, but whatever, I have Dark Reader, I can fix it... on typical webpages.

The problem is, this applies to extension pages as well, and their extension bar icon settings popup menu, whose appearance cannot be affected by extensions for browser security reasons. Most notably Stylus (the extension I use for changing site appearance, of all things), but also others, are unreadable and thus nigh-unusable, especially from the extension bar. (Technically I can make the Stylus "manage" page readable by turning it sepia, but that doesn't help the extension bar icon's settings menu, which I use far more often.)

Checked against another computer, Windows 10, same behaviour on high contrast mode but not Win10 dark theme. Issue also present in private browsing.

I had a look through Vivaldi's settings as well, and didn't see an option to change/customise the default background colour where unspecified, which would solve my issue.

I could live with the webpage display issue, I've been dealing with it in another browser for a while now (also via a dark theme extension), but I'd rather not have to guess and pray whenever I need to enable/disable a theme in Stylus itself.

Is there anything else I can do?

Tl;dr high contrast theme background colour used for unspecified background colour, for webpages and browser extensions. Text colour is not changed, resulting in black-on-dark-grey, most notably in extension menus.

Pathduck

@corruleum I tested with High Contrast here in Win10, and I see the same issue with some extension popups as well as UI elements where the text becomes unreadable. It also sets some page backgrounds to black.

Not really sure what to do about it though. Searching a bit found some articles mentioning flags to try, but they didn't seem to have any effect.
https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/f751fk/google_chrome_turn_off_high_contrast_browsing/
https://techdows.com/2019/10/microsoft-adds-high-contrast-mode-support-to-chrome-and-chromium-edge-here-is-how-to-enable-it.html
https://news.softpedia.com/news/how-google-chrome-will-handle-high-contrast-mode-going-forward-527829.shtml
https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/50030081?hl=en

This is probably a Chromium "feature" and while you could report it to the Vivaldi team I doubt they'll be able to do anything about it before it's fixed in upstream Chromium.

Note that high contrast themes are meant for users with very specific needs and disabilities. They're not really meant for users who just want "cool" dark backgrounds on everything. These users will likely have a lot of other accessibility settings on their systems.

corruleum

Thanks all for your input.

Pathduck, yeah, that's what I'm seeing on my end. It definitely seems like a Chromium issue, like that last link you provided (which Vivaldi had for a while, and which seems to be fixed now). The other links are more "make Chrome respect system high contrast theme" from what I can tell. (And yes, I do know high contrast themes aren't intended as "cool" dark themes; it's my method of last resort on a system that doesn't support a better form of dark theme.)

Gwen-Dragon, thanks for the suggestion, I'll try patching it.

Ice007

In my opinion Vivaldi shouldn't adapt to extensions, but vice versa. If they are too stupid to program an extension, then Vivaldi is not to blame.

corruleum

@Gwen-Dragon Huh, Stylus actually can change its own page CSS, that's cool. Thanks for the link!

Eberwurz

Hey there,

I have the exact same problem. Tested it with and without extensions.
Windows 10 with high contrast mode activated.
All backgrounds OS wide set to black and text color is set to green.
However vivaldi doesnt recognize the change of default background to black and thus has default black text to display.
This is, except for rare cases, only a problem on pure html5 test pages and some addons (option pages background black on black).
Pages which render javascript or css background render white. For those i aswell use dark reader.

The same behavior can be observed in Opera.
In Edge however the background is black (as my OS) but the text of such pages is also in OS text color (so green) and therefor perfectly visible.

Thus the problem here lies solely in Vivaldi (and other chromium derivates) adopting OS background color but not OS text color.

I can provide screens of the appearance if you have trouble imagining how it looks.

kind regards

Eberwurz

EDIT: Is there a bug already filed for this as i assume this is not too hard to fix but causes quite a major visibility problem for me.

My Workaround so far is to Ctrl + A to select the whole page and read it this way. After selecting anything else however the focus changes and one loses text visibility.

Eberwurz

@Gwen-Dragon
Thanks for reacting so quick after me digging out this two months old thread.
For reference:
I filed the bug under the tracker number VB-75239.
Have a nice day.