My site uses a lot of strange, flashy colours (colors, if you will).
I like them, chose them
with care, and they play a role in the atmosphere I am trying to create.
However, I can quite understand that some people don’t like them, or even find such
colours appalling. Others - some 8 percent of men - are colour blind, as a result of which
many combinations of foreground (text) and background colours I use,
have hardly any constrast for them. That makes text difficult or impossible to read.
I ran some of the simulations of how my pages look to colour blind people, and couldn’t
read much myself either. Quite an eye-opener.
Some links about being colour blind (or more correctly: colour deficiency): Microsoft, Firelily, Vis Check, BtExact, Web techniques, Web Exhibits.
For these reasons, I decided to offer the visitor a choice. So now you can disable my crazy colours, and replace them with a neutral, flat, pale, to my liking extremely dull and boring, tiringly bright and white colour scheme. But if that’s how you like it better, that’s what you get. It’s up to you.
You can make this choice by clicking (or Tab-to and Entering) the Neutral link I have on several pages. The Weird link restores my weird colours. (Click Reload, or Ctrl-R or Ctrl-F5 to see them, I didn’t manage to let this happen automatically).
The colour switching uses Cookies. Regarding privacy: I do not keep any lists
of who pressed this link, I don’t record who you are. All that happens is,
I ask your browser to remember the string "NoWeirdColours", so that if you access
my site again, that same browser tells me (i.e. web server Apache nginx)
"NoWeirdColours", and I can use different CSS, so you get neutral colours instead.
More info about cookies: Cookie Central, NewNet, Netscape.
If you disable cookies in your browser, the colour preference option probably doesn’t work, or you have to repeat your choice every time you visit again.
The switch uses some Javascript. Without it, it also works. But then you must return yourself after the cookie was set or reset, by pressing the Back button of your browser. And to see the changed colours, request a Reload by pressing Control-R or Control-F5. With Javascript enabled, you can also Reload by clicking the Reload link I provide.
If choosing between two colour schemes, one crazy and one neutral, is not enough
for you, you could also look at the preferences/options/settings etc. of your
browser. Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, Opera have an option to prefer your own customized
colours over those of the page.
Opera even lets you refer to your own style sheet in CSS.