The White House website now has a dark mode

The official White House website, WhiteHouse.gov, has been completely replaced by a new version for the Biden administration and comes with some unexpected accessibility features: a high contrast mode, which works as a dark mode, and an alternation to increase the font size.

Both options appear along the left track as large buttons that are easy to click or touch, and that’s how you need to switch them. Even if your device has a system-wide dark mode, the White House website will not automatically change. That’s because it really exists to serve as an accessibility feature, designed to help anyone who has trouble reading or looking at a glossy white screen with black text.

With the dark mode being very popular with heavy computer users, people online were understandably excited by the change.

The large text mode – unsurprisingly – makes the text on the site significantly larger, while still preserving the layout, something that may not be true when using a browser’s built-in zoom capability.

Acting as a recruiting tool for anyone looking at the site’s code, the HTML header also makes a call to the US Digital Service. The group, led by a former Google engineer, is tasked with ensuring that the websites of the United States government are as good as any that we visit daily.

While the previous WhiteHouse.gov site was by no means a disaster (at least technically speaking), it is good to see that the new administration is taking accessibility and digital competence seriously from the start.