Gareth Evans

Agreed: Dark mode must be a native feature.

From my perspective, it seems that the effort required to implement Dark Mode has been deemed (by Zendesk product team) not worth the ROI. A more direct correlation between dark mode and lost revenue would change this perception.

There is a larger industry push towards accessible interfaces, intended to provide users with different types of disabilities access to the web. https://wcag.com/resource/what-is-wcag/

Zendesk themselves have acknowledged this push: https://www.zendesk.com/company/agreements-and-terms/accessibility/

Note there that the reports they provide are from 2019. A TLDR is that most Zendesk products have partial support (at best AA rather than the full AAA) for the WCAG 2.0 standard. In the three years since those reports, WCAG 2.1 is the new standard.

WCAG 2.1 support isn’t a legal standard: however, we are beginning to see mandates at the US state level (Colorado for example). This means that if a product does not support WCAG 2.1, the state will not allow its use. Therefore, Zendesk (and any other web application vendor) is now seeing pressure to implement the standard or face lost revenue.

My theory is that the scope of work involved in adding Dark Mode to Zendesk is a (small) subset of the work required to implement WCAG 2.1 support. Therefore, once we see improvement in accessibility design in Zendesk we will eventually see native Dark Mode implemented.

Andrey Resler couldn't agree more.

Will Martin see Amy Lee's comments above. 

Andrew S whoa, thanks for the heads up - this is a decent alternative. For those curious: Midnight Lizard - color schemes for all websites (midnight-lizard.org) The default version actually works quite well:

Thanks @...! It's good to be heard. We'll put down our pitchforks, I swear... 

From what I can see, @... is no longer active on the Zendesk community so it could be that he's no longer with the organization. I'm wondering how we can get this issue escalated within the organization.

Paging @... Adrian McDermott & Toke Nygaard, please help us!

Echoing the comments above.

It's surprising to see Zendesk, a company with over 5k employees that all use a web browser all day long, overlook basic accessibility functionality such as this. Not to mention pointing paying customers towards untrustworthy third-party browser plugins that default to having full access to all pages that you browse. 

The benefits of Dark Mode are numerous: accessibility, style, visual hierarchy... the list goes on. 

Here's a few links on the topic:

- E-commerce dark mode case study. Turn the lights off and enjoy the… | by Manuj Gosain | Bootcamp (uxdesign.cc)

- Dark Side of UI. Benefits of Dark Background (tubikstudio.com)

To me the question is "how is it that there isn't a native dark mode for Zendesk?" and right now it feels like it's been wilfully ignored.