Hi, I'd like to be able to customize the colors in a scheme such as high contrast or clear looks to suit my vision. Are there any tutorials, proper specs on where each color is used and info on the language in which the textual theme files are written? I still think this is much harder than it should be. I've Googled and amazingly though people seem to want it badly, check out:
http://gnomesupport.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1740 for example, there's no proper theme editor for even picking the colors for Gnome themes. Even Windows does better in this regard not to mention KDE-. As I am not a fan of custom text files and the command-line, editing the colors in the GUI would be much faster and it would enable one to easily preview any setting changes. If you edit files manually, are there any ways to refresh the theme in real time easily? Another problem I have is that the scheme is not well defined. Some people say you have to dig up the APi documentation to determine what each color does, ouch. That's an unreasonable requirement for end-users, at least would be in the Windows world. That would be bearable but according to some tutorials I've tried reading, e.g: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeArt/Tutorials/GtkThemes One has to define each color for five different states for each control. That seems quite difficult if one only knows how color gets used in Win32, It would be so much easier if some application could optionally derive some of the colors programmatically once you do define the main colors. This is how the theme editor works in some other OSes e.g. the shadow and light colors in WIn32. As to what's wrong with the schemes, here's some info: I'm legally blind but do have a bit of sight left. I mostly use magnification to track the mouse if I need to use it. Even without magnification, though, I can get some of the big picture by looking at the screen. The info includes the approximate position and size of windows and large controls like lists, buttons and groups of radio buttons. That, in turn, gives me a big usability boost, even though I cannot read on-screen text unmagnified. The trouble with all of the Gnome themes is that they don't provide proper contrast between GUI element backgrounds. The contrast between text and dialogs is great but the one between UI element backgrounds is not. In my sight situation, that's a mistake I've seen repeated in numerous high-contrast schemes for various platforms. As an example, let's consider text fields. It is hard for me to tell where a text field is, because its background color is almost the same as that of the window or dialog background. I'd choose turquoise for dialogs and light yellow for the fields. That keeps both field and dialog text readable for me while also making fields stand out from the dialog because of the difference in their background color. Contrast is what primarily matters to me, as a whole, and I also find pure white slightly dazzzling in large quantities. Personally, using a white on a dark blue or black scheme would truely make scroll bars, title bars and push buttons stand out, too. I'm pretty certain my sight situation is rather unique. But on the other hand, I also believe that there are other sight impaired people who would benefit from a significant contrast between GUI element backgrounds. More sight info here: http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/sight.html For reference, here's a screenshot showing my current Windows look in a text editor: http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/wintheme.PNG I'd like to change the buttons and scroll bars to white on dark blue but that stupid legacy color scheme won't let me. I was kinda hoping LInux didn't have limitations like a shared text color for buttons and dialogs. I know KDE does not, at least. Well any help appreciated as usual. -- With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming: http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/ -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
