The other useful vision accessibility setting is "Color Filters" - I've used this one two different ways.
Currently, I've got it set to put a reddish-orange cast on the screen - like a "turbo night shift" more similar to the depth F.lux will let you take your mac. You can use the Shortcuts app to create a shortcut to enable the filter, and then set that to turn on at certain points, so around 10 at night my phone goes from normal night shift to a much more aggressive red/orange-shifted profile. The effect at night is dramatic - the phone becomes much less jarring to look at. The OLED screens are great for this, too - a reduction in blue color is a reduction in blue light. The shortcut turns itself back off at 6am.
The other filter you can apply is a black & white filter, which removes all color from the screen. Give this a try for an hour and then turn it off - you'll be amazed at the riot of attention-grabbing color app makers are throwing at you. I've found it's a lot easier not to get sucked into the phone hole when the UI is set to black & white - the whole device feels calmer and less urgent.
If you haven't spent time in the accessibility settings, though, go exploring. It's where Apple puts all the good stuff.
The alternative to black and white stuff is simply: curate what you have in your phone. Uninstall all social media (yes all). Keep only constructive content on your device. No useless apps sending notifications, no feed of brain-rotting content at one tap on you homescreen.
I keep:
- a carefully curated list of high-quality channels on youtube (on newpipe, so no tracking and no echo chamber personalised recommendations)
- a carefully curated list of high-quality subreddits
- hackernews
And that's it. Just cut off the junk, grayscale wont save you
I'm not surprised the good features are hidden behind Accessibility. I'd argue most other features on a phone are designed for someone else's benefit. Albeit cleverly disguised as benefits for the user.
While sloped, level curb cuts at intersections have been implemented primarily for accessibility legislation compliance, it turns out they are useful not only for the disabled but for people with strollers, heavy bags, etc. A similar effect can also be seen with the modern ubiquity of closed captioning.
Yeah, this is a standard mantra in Accessibility work - ability is a spectrum, and people move up and down this spectrum both across their lives and even within their days.
I like the saying "most people are temporarily able-bodied". You will likely need accessibility at some point in your life - and almost surely nearing the end of it.
So clearly affordances to assist the disabled are going to benefit everyone ... eventually.
I vaguely remember a statistic of something like 20 or 30% of the population will be disabled at some time in their life. (Easy examples include old people needing walkers/sticks).
MS also had a very interesting design for disability brochure that talked about how even a "regular" person can be temporarily disabled - eg if you're holding a heavy bag of groceries, opening a door that needs 2 hands is very difficult. Designing for amputees will also help the 99% of the population doing grocery runs.
I have a family member who’s made her career on compliance consulting for the built environment standard for Ontario. She always mentions how much accessibility accommodations are actually improvements to spaces, not just separate “just in case a blind person comes here” utilities.
You’re designing for the interface/usage pattern, not so much a specific disability. A curb cut is a usage pattern for anything with wheels. A greyscale mode is a usage pattern for anyone that wants/needs information conveyed without relying on colour distinctions.
Tons of those adaptions are just plain useful in cases outside disability.
I wonder what the opposite of the curb cut effect is? For example, tactile paving is an accessibility feature that benefits one group but can hinder many others with accessibility needs.
Anecdotally, I've observed that elderly people with grocery carts and people in wheel chairs have difficulty at cross walks navigating these features. The wiki mentions these points:
"...more thought should have been put into balancing the needs of vision-impaired pedestrians and mobility-impaired pedestrians, such as wheelchair and cane users, who can trip on the bumps."
True but it's also vice versa. Some settings located outside of Accessibility are helpful for disabled people. Perhaps they should utilize shortcut links
I do the exercise of imagining the colors one would be exposed to as a hunter gatherer (context in which humans developed, 90% of human history), and there would seldom be anything vibrant (sunsets, sky, plants/flowers) when compared to today. I would imagine black + white on the phone would assist in more optimally calibrating one's dopaminergic pathways / receptors.
You might not have noticed, but check for the button called "Extra Dim" in your Samsung top area quick controls. It's not enabled by default but allows toggling additional dimming. You can customise it in settings to control the level of dimming, adding a a screen or key shortcut, and control whether it activates on phone reboot or not.
Key shortcut (or deactivate on reboot) can be helpful if you set it way up, and have adaptive brightness off, and it is a sunny day.
(oh, and yeah, it does work nicely with B&W mode and blue light filter modes - all 3 are quite helpful for reading in bed without staying up too late)
B&W mode is great until you're trying look at photos or watch videos. I wish there was a setting in the operating system to remove color from UI elements and not videos or images. Or turn B&W on/off for certain apps, like photos and youtube.
And I guess not having color for videos is maybe the point, but I can't manage to use it at all if I can't watch videos with color.
A few months ago I played around with a bunch of iOS shortcuts to turn the grayscale mode off when I opened certain apps then back on when I closed them. It was a cute idea, I thought, but it didn’t work reliably so I quickly turned it off.
I do the same thing with a shortcut of Triple Click side button -> Color Filters. You can set this up in Accessibility and it will let you tint your phone to be nearly 100% red pixels.
I've been using a similar shortcut like this for a while on iOS for bedtime reading. I hadn't seen the "reduce whitepoint" option before, but by setting the shortcut to "zoom" you can get a similar (possibly slightly dimmer?) effect. The trick is to make it so the zoom shortcut dims the unzoomed area, and then set the unzoomed area to the entire screen. I just checked, and the effects of those two settings stack to make things quite dark.
Been doing this for several years now and it works great (triple click the Home button to dim the screen), but I can't help but wonder if a standalone setting in iOS wouldn't be a better option.
That's interesting, I'll look into it. Using the method outlined in the article I can get it to the point of being almost not being able to see the screen. Though at night once your eyes adjust, I think going even dimmer could be useful.
One downside of either the zoom trick or the reduce whitepoint option is that you won't see the screen dim before the screen locks from inactivity. This occasionally trips me up if I'm having trouble reading a page quickly. I usually work around this by just touching the screen occasionally or increasing the inactivity limit temporarily.
The nonsense Apple users go to for the simplest of features is always mind blowing to me. If they were paying 1/2 the price I'd get it but Apple products just make no sense to me.
You don't need to go to "nonsense." Night mode is built-in to iOS, no software required - and it's Android that is imitating iOS with the accessibility menu, not the other way around. iOS is famous for its accessibility features. Since the early days of MacOS, Apple has always included accessibility features in its software.
For years I've had "make the screen red" as a shortcut to three home button rapid presses.
> Apple products just make no sense to me.
I'm using an iPhone that cost me $300 used when I bought it several years ago, is now six years old, was until a month or so fully supported OS-wise and will continue to get security updates for another year or two, and is plenty fast enough for everything I do. Airdrop is incredibly handy, almost daily, and has no equivalent on the Android side. It backs up automatically to my mac any time it's on wifi and has power, also no equivalent on Android. I have a ton of the data collection turned off in the privacy tab. Half my apps don't know my real email address because I use Apple's email proxy service. iOS integrates nicely with my open-source self-hosted file sync and my open-source password database. The apps on my device collect a lot less data about me, and my device is not incessantly reporting everything it can to Google.
The battery is original and has 75% of its capacity, and battery life is generally excellent. Not a single component in the phone has needed replacement / worn out. The screen is great. The speakers are great. Reception is great. Facetime audio calls are really pleasant with a couple of friends compared to regular phone calls. It never crashes. The Lightning jack still works perfectly, for example - and I don't bother with wireless charging most of the time.
I get that it's nice to prop up one's ego thinking that you're *so much smarter than millions of people who are willing to pay a premium for something, or you can accept that there's a reason people make a choice other than what you do, that they might be different reasons, different priorities, etc.
We actually have a slider bar in the quick menu drop down. Also Night Light which removes blue light (also in the drop down). These can also be programmed to go on/off at set times (bedtime mode). Meanwhile, my husband as never been able to locate any of these in an iPhone without the help of this thread.
> We actually have a slider bar in the quick menu drop down.
You mean like iPhone's Control Center, which is a pull up? There's a large, very clear screen brightness widget...
> Meanwhile, my husband as never been able to locate any of these in an iPhone without the help of this thread.
Aside from the fact that I believe night shift is on by default:
You long press the screen brightness slider (long presses are a common UI function...) and boom, there's two buttons for dark mode and night shift, and below night shift it says "off until (time here")
Or you can type in "night" into the system-wide search and "night shift" pops up as an option?
Or you can google "night mode iphone"?
Your husband being completely helpless isn't the fault of iOS.
As someone else already pointed out, this is in addition to the normal brightness control. This is also notably the only settings hack I’ve ever needed since switching to iPhones from Androids about eight years ago, and in the course of replying to this thread I discovered that the hack isn’t even needed anymore since the reduce white point setting has a slider. I was shocked after the switch about how little tweaking I needed to do to have a device I actually enjoyed using.
I use some of the astro apps like Star Walk and the like, and there's a glaring issue with their internal red modes. When you need to input text, it uses the OS keyboard which is no longer red filtered. It is very jarring when out in the dark.
Do the filters you're suggesting also tint the keyboard?
I would love an Android app that lets me reliably set the brightness to 1 or 2%. Not 3%, not 0%. The default slider makes this nearly impossible. I've tried a few programs to do this and none worked well.
Pretty sure Macrodroid or Tasker can do this. In Macrodroid, I can set brightness to an integer 0-100 for brightness percentage.
Plus, on Pixels at least, there is a setting for Extra Dim (in accessibility settings) which can also probably be set via Macrodroid/Tasker. May need the ADB hack to allow system setting changes though.
hmm I'll try that. I realize now I may need 0-255, which I think is the native measurement in the API. I really do want a very small number over 0; on this Samsung tablet that's what looks right.
On Pixel phones you can assign the extra dim toggle to pressing both volume keys at once. It's also accessible on many Android phones via a quick settings tile.
LineageOS lets you activate it on a schedule, e.g. 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. I think maybe stock Android does too?
This is one of the many areas that Samsung phones suck. For many versions, and for older phones that are mostly stuck on those versions, they hide this Android feature entirely. I managed to get it sort-of working by figuring out the intent name and making a shortcut for it in my launcher. (If you have a brand new Samsung, I don't think this is an issue.)
You can also (at least on Samsung phones) adjust the "Extra dim shortcut"!
I have it set it to "Tap Accessibility button", which is a small person-shaped icon that sits at the very bottom right of my screen, to the right of the Back button.
I think it also matters how you interact with said content. Scrolling is really bad as it needs near constant interaction but page turning via taps anywhere on the screen seems to work really well.
The screen on my eReader is a way better shape than any phone when it comes to reading books. Add to that the fact they cost a fraction what a phone costs and can't possibly send a notification to keep you awake makes them the superior falling asleep device for me. I also don't need any weird hacks like this to make the screen really dim.
The idea to work on this was partially inspired by stargazing apps, e.g. NightSky.
I'm still not 100% if these experiments are worth pursuing (I need to pay rent) but if you'd like to see a tool like this, or if you have any use-cases I didn't mention, please let me know.
For Mac, Lunar (brew install --cask lunar) gives "sub-zero dimming" that works perfectly -- it hooks into the brightness keys and gives a whole second, lower menu. The lowest setting is actually too dim (as any lowest non-zero brightness setting should be...) Works for external monitors, too!
There's no Reduce White Point on Mac as far as I am aware. However, you can use the fantastic Lunar [0] app to achieve this, as it supports "Sub-Zero Dimming".
To use it, I think you just need to start Lunar, and then press the Reduce Brightness button on your keyboard until it goes below the minimum Mac allows.
https://www.pangobright.com/ on windows is great, albeit a little weird. I think it makes a transparent always on top window that doesnt take events. System right click menus and stuff seem to no be under it.
I’ve done exactly this for years now. I’m not sure if it actually reduces “blue light” enough to prevent me from triggering my brain’s “it’s daytime” mode, but I figure it’s at least allowing my pupils to stay more dilated (better night vision)
Edit: I don’t make a habit of looking at my phone in bed. In addition to the “blue light” there are other things that contribute to wakefulness, such as any voluntary muscle movement (scrolling and tapping) and even just keeping your conscious brain active, which I find I do when I’m interacting with my phone.
This is excellent information! I use my phone in bed, maybe too much, and wished for long time it could go lower. The Kindle app on my iPad will go lower so I knew it was possible. Thank you!
By "information" you mean the idea that a screen brightness can be adjusted? I am honestly confused if you thought before reading this that pixels were somehow limited by how dim they could get?
This is not just the backlight setting: below a certain level the feature will darken the level of the pixels so that white (255, 255, 255) is reduced to something darker. On an OLED screen, of course, this just has the effect of allowing lower brightnesses than the phone's minimum, but on backlit screens it still has a surprisingly large effect.
I have no extra dim settings on my Android phone but I've been using Screen Filter since 2011. It's a sub half MB app last updated in 2013 that paints a dark overlay on the screen and makes it darker than the minimum darkness reachable from the brightness slider. Its darkness is configurable and it's pretty much everything it does.
The zoom trick is how you used to have to do it, but then they added reduce white point. When you enable reduce white point, a slider is shown that lets you adjust it, all the way down to almost completely off. I can’t imagine needing to layer zoom on top of it once you reach that level.
On a similar note, you can use the shortcuts app on iphone to make a flashlight toggle that can be set much lower than what can be set through control panel.
I miss this from the original iPhone (or somewhere around iPhone 4) where the system would let you just turn the backlight all the way to off (though it could be hard to turn it back up if you turned off auto brightness).
Moon reader for Android has a built-in feature to set extra-low brightness using something like a full-screen gray/alpha overlay. That, plus white text on a full-screen black background, makes for an extremely dim screen.
It only works for reading ebooks (or whatever you can open in the app), which IMO is a huge benefit. I don't want to be scrolling nonsense websites in bed, but I do think a smartphone ebook reader is the least-bright, most comfortable and most ergonomic way to read in bed.
FYI for iOS users; instead of toggling this through the accessibility tap you can also set up a Shortcut that toggles the white point, or even just toggle it directly from Spotlight on the home screen by searching "white point" and tapping the switch
I did this a few weeks ago and it is a gamechanger. The only bad thing is that it enables me to stay on my phone late at night when I should be sleeping.
Hey, someone had the same idea! This was the first shortcut I actually found useful. I also have it increase the text size since at my preferred white point the text at default can be pretty difficult to read.
Then a 2nd shortcut to reverse everything back to how I like it in the daytime.
I did. I have an "Asus Zenfone Max Pro M1" (what a mouthful) and the volume is always too high and the audio ridiculously bad at "low" volumes. Changing some values with ALSA makes it almost bearable. The easiest way I found to do that was to root the phone, compile tinyalsa in termux and use this script to call tinyalsa with root:
If anyone has ideas how to do this without root, get around the issue of calls being lower volume or remove the dependency on tinyalsa and termux, I'm all ears.
SoundAssistant on Samsung devices lets you do this as well. It gives you per-app sliders which stack with the main slider allowing you to go below 1% -- or whatever number rounds to "off" on your headphones.
Currently, I've got it set to put a reddish-orange cast on the screen - like a "turbo night shift" more similar to the depth F.lux will let you take your mac. You can use the Shortcuts app to create a shortcut to enable the filter, and then set that to turn on at certain points, so around 10 at night my phone goes from normal night shift to a much more aggressive red/orange-shifted profile. The effect at night is dramatic - the phone becomes much less jarring to look at. The OLED screens are great for this, too - a reduction in blue color is a reduction in blue light. The shortcut turns itself back off at 6am.
The other filter you can apply is a black & white filter, which removes all color from the screen. Give this a try for an hour and then turn it off - you'll be amazed at the riot of attention-grabbing color app makers are throwing at you. I've found it's a lot easier not to get sucked into the phone hole when the UI is set to black & white - the whole device feels calmer and less urgent.
If you haven't spent time in the accessibility settings, though, go exploring. It's where Apple puts all the good stuff.