High Contrast Mode in Windows and Chrome: What It Does

High contrast mode replaces an app's colors with a small set of strongly contrasting ones, for people with low vision or light sensitivity. In Windows 11 it's called contrast themes, and Chrome follows it on websites too.

Turn on contrast themes in Windows

• Go to Settings → Accessibility → Contrast themes, pick a theme (such as Night sky or Desert), and click Apply.
• Or press Left Alt + Left Shift + Print Screen to toggle it.
• Each theme can be customized: background, text, links and buttons.

What it does in Chrome

Chrome uses a mode called forced colors. Websites are drawn with your theme's colors: text, backgrounds, borders and links all take the theme's palette, and shadows are removed. Photos and videos still show normally.

• Most sites stay usable, because text and controls are recolored.
• Icons and buttons that rely on color alone can become hard to see, and some custom buttons lose their outlines.
• Well-built sites test for this with the CSS forced-colors media query and fix those issues.

High contrast vs dark mode

• Dark mode swaps light backgrounds for dark ones but keeps a site's design and colors.
• High contrast overrides the design with a few colors, chosen for maximum legibility.

If you mainly want less glare, dark mode is gentler. If text is hard to make out, high contrast helps more.

More contrast in Chrome only

If you don't want to change all of Windows:

• A dark mode extension with a contrast setting can help. Modern Dark Mode has contrast and brightness sliders and keeps images in their real colors.
• Chrome's Reading mode lets you choose high-contrast colors and larger text for articles.
• ADHD Reading Focus shows one paragraph at a time with adjustable text size, which helps when long pages are hard to track.

On a Mac, look under System Settings → Accessibility → Display for Increase contrast and Invert colors.

For web designers

Test your site with a Windows contrast theme on. Use real text and borders rather than background images for important controls, and check your normal colors with the contrast checker. See accessibility testing tools.