Also, why don't we let users decide which contrast works best for them?
My https://wordsandbuttons.online/ uses default browser colors for anything other than interactive illustrations. For those, I just don't know how to make user choice work with the graphics they show since the graphics is always different from picture to picture, so I impose slightly tinted background as part of the palette.
Unfortunately the default browser colours for the web are always black text on white background and do not respect the user's desktop theme, be it dark or something else.
My job for the last decade has been to facilitate accessibility.
Not only have I never heard of this control existing in native Chrome, I can't figure out how to do it. I'm doubtful, then, that we can consider this a remedy of any kind for accessibility issues.
My hunch is that you mean that there are extensions that provide this – which I definitely have issues classing as "browsers providing" much in the way of anything.
Your hunch is incorrect. Perhaps they have removed this functionality, I haven't checked, but this historically is functionality that was used to change the default background/text colors of all pages, built in to the browser.
Hm... Perhaps you're misremembering? I'll be fairly surprised if this was ever in Chrome, for a few reasons. When do you know that this last existed?
Closest thing I can find are custom user stylesheets – which were removed in 2014 (also not sure if "write some CSS" is an a11y solution, heh): https://codereview.chromium.org/66383005/
I know at least firefox at one point used the system default background and text colors. This of course worked horribly as many websites (including Google at some point) would override the background or text color with a custom value and not the other assuming that the user would be using the default theme on Windows (or just not caring), which left you with dark grey text on dark background on many websites if you used a dark system theme.
I do agree the the actual point that the default colors have nothing to do with user preference though.
My https://wordsandbuttons.online/ uses default browser colors for anything other than interactive illustrations. For those, I just don't know how to make user choice work with the graphics they show since the graphics is always different from picture to picture, so I impose slightly tinted background as part of the palette.