Dithering makes color transitions look smoother and makes colors look richer by switching between colors quickly, creating an optical illusion that tricks our eyes into seeing colors that aren't in the display. As such it is just a different kind of flickering, to which some human eyes might reasonably be sensitive.
WCAG has standards for all kinds of colorblindness. Using poor color contrast would certainly be "smoother" or "prettier" on some web sites, but we (web devs) don't do it because we want our site to be accessible, and WCAG is now a general industry standard. I don't see why we couldn't begin to get these display features (blue light, PWM, temporal dithering) into other standards. There is already something very close in WCAG that acknowledges people with sensitive vision, which is motion sensitivity. And these are legitimate health issues that are being triggered in some users, affecting our ability to make a living and access services that in many cases are now only available by doing something online. WCAG isn't the right standard, though, because it's a confluence of hardware, drivers, and OS.
- All laptop and monitor manufacturers should have ALL PWM refresh rates and their brightness levels published on the box, easy to view and don't have to be a tech geek to dig it up.
- Same thing with all pertinent hardware specs that pertain to color and color display (I don't know as much about this).
- Anything software related (blue light, dithering, contrast, font smoothing) you should be able to turn it off in the OS settings.