While working on a recent project I noticed an issue with a canvas-based audio visualization when I toggled between light and dark modes. When I’d originally set it up I was browsing in dark mode and the light visualization stroke showed up perfectly on the dark background, but it was invisible when viewed using the light theme (which I’d neglected to test). I searched around, but didn’t find any articles on easy ways to make canvas respond nicely to user preferences, so I thought I’d share (in brief) how I solved it.

The CSS Setup

The theming of this particular project uses CSS custom properties. For simplicty I’m going to set up two named colors and then use two theme-specific custom properties to apply them in the default light theme and the dark theme:

:root {
  --color-dark: #222;
  --color-light: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.5);

  --color-background: var(--color-light);
  --color-foreground: var(--color-dark);
}

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
  :root {
    --color-background: var(--color-dark);
    --color-foreground: var(--color-light);
  }
}

Applying the Theme to Canvas

To get the theme into my canvas-related code, I set up a theme object to hold the values:

const theme = {};

Next, I wrote a function to pull in the theme colors using window.getComputedStyle(). After defining the function, I call it immediately to populate the theme object:

function importTheme() {
  theme.foreground =
    window
      .getComputedStyle(document.documentElement)
      .getPropertyValue("--color-foreground")
      .trim() || "black";
  theme.background =
    window
      .getComputedStyle(document.documentElement)
      .getPropertyValue("--color-background")
      .trim() || "white";
}
importTheme();

I set this up with just two theme colors, but you can import as many (or few) as you like. Be sure to set a sensible default or fallback for each color though, just in case your theme’s custom property names change.

With this in place, I can set my canvas animation’s colors by referencing them from the theme object. For example:

context.fillStyle = theme.foreground;

Keeping Things in Sync

The final bit of magic comes when you add an event listener to a MediaQueryList:

const mediaQuery = window.matchMedia("(prefers-color-scheme: dark)");
mediaQuery.addEventListener("change", importTheme);

Here I’ve used matchMedia() to get a MediaQueryList object. Typically we use the matches property of this object to establish whether the media query currently matches or not. A lesser-known option, however, is that you can attach an event listener to it that will be triggered whenever the query’s status changes. So cool! With this in place, the canvas contents will update whenever the user’s theme changes. Here’s an example of that:

Demo

I put together a quick demo of this in a fork of Alvin Shaw’s Canvas Sine Wave Experiment:

---

Hopefully this is helpful to someone out there. Happy theming!