Curb Cuts Has a dark mode now

The headline says it all. Curb Cuts now has a dark mode.

After solving my “IPHONE” and “IOS” problems last week, I resolved to get even more ambitious in improving the website by adding a dark mode for nighttime viewing. As someone whose devices automatically flip to dark mode at sundown, it’s always bugged me how eye-searingly white my default “light” theme is when I check the site at, say, 9:00 at night. Other blogs run by friends, like Stephen Hackett’s 512 Pixels and Federico Viticci’s MacStories have discrete dark modes and they look very nice, so why shouldn’t Curb Cuts have one too? So yesterday, I decided to spend part of my evening building my own dark mode—all done, of course, with lots of heavy lifting from ChatGPT.

The cool part about Curb Cuts’ new dark mode is it’s automatic; it triggers based on a user’s UI setting. If your iPhone or iPad or MacBook is in light mode during the day, you’ll get the light theme. At night, the proverbial light switch gets flipped off and you’ll get the dark theme. There remain a few minor tweaks to be made, but I think the new look is awesome (and accessible!) and I’m damn proud at being 95% of the way there.

As a practical matter, what I wrote last week is apt here too. I’m decidedly not a web developer, so the lines of CSS code I copy-and-pasted into the Squarespace CMS are instructions I don’t have the skill to write on my own. That’s where I again leaned heavily onto ChatGPT, telling the chatbot what I envisioned for dark mode and having it automatically spit out the code I needed to make my dreams a reality. It took some trial-and-error, but as I said, I’m super happy with the end result despite the need for a bit more polish. I’ll say once more with feeling that code generation is a prime use case for generative AI tools like ChatGPT (or Gemini or whatnot) and, more pertinently, showcase how chatbots can be assistive technologies by making a fit of relatively advanced web development eminently more accessible as a person with disabilities.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy dark mode. Get in touch with any comments or questions.