White House website now has dark mode

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

Both options appear along the left rail as large buttons that are easy to click or press, and that’s how you’ll need to activate them. Even if your device has a system-wide dark mode, the White House website will not automatically switch. That’s because it’s really there to serve as an accessibility feature, meant to help anyone who might have a hard time reading or staring at a glossy white screen with black text.

With dark mode also very popular among heavy computer users, netizens were understandably excited to see the change.

Wide text mode – unsurprisingly – dramatically enlarges site text, while preserving the layout, which may not be true when using a browser’s built-in zoom capability.

Acting as a recruiting tool for anyone looking through site code, the HTML header also helps call the US digital service. The group, led by a former Google engineer, is tasked with making sure that U.S. government websites are as good as any others we visit on a daily basis.

While the previous WhiteHouse.gov site was by no means a shipwreck (at least technically speaking), it’s good to see that the new administration takes accessibility and digital competence seriously from the get-go.