Re: REMINDER: GEP-2 discussion end date

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On Mon, 2002-09-30 at 05:01, Bill Haneman wrote:
> On Sun, 2002-09-29 at 00:07, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>  
> > I draw the opposite conclusion - I think this indicates that
> > overloading accessibility settings onto the theme feature in Windows
> > was a mistake. I would guess the reason they did this was so that
> > users who do not have special needs would not be exposed to
> > accessibility-specific themes at all, and so that users who do need
> > them would find them in the logical place, "Accessibility".
> 
> The UI in the 'Accessibility' dialog duplicates that of the 'Theme'
> dialog, and once you've selected an "accessibility" theme (all of them
> are , wrongly, called "high-contrast" in XP) you can then use it in the
> XP "Theme" dialog.
> 
> In XP the two UIs are identical, and offer the same functionality,
> except that the accessibility themes are not exposed to the user in the
> "Theme" dialog until they are selected and saved.
> 
> Two identical UIs that do the same thing are always a bad idea.  As I
> said the only difference is the fact that the "Theme" one hides some of
> the available themes from users.

I claim that the difference in opinion between you and I stems *exactly*
from the fact that my design addresses what I believe is the best theme
interface (which I claim does not include things like font, and perhaps
background) and yours tries to address changing accesibility settings
(which include things like font size, etc). So I completely disagree
with the notion that we're looking at two identical interfaces. I claim
we're looking at two somewhat similar ideas that at first glance seemed
compatible but upon careful consideration result in different
interfaces. Trying to mold something into an interface that it doesn't
really fit is always a bad idea.

> > But really, the confusion comes about because themes and accessibility
> > share implementation.
> > 
> > But as I mentioned before, this is not the only way to do it. In Mac
> > OS X, the accessibility settings are completely separate from theme
> > settings, and can be applied without affecting the user's chosen theme
> > or other display settings. It's also possible to turn on both screen
> > magnification and white on black display separately, for instance.
> 
> We already offer this too.  Some of the themes are black-and-white, etc.
> and they have different icon and font sizes, etc.
>  
> > I think this works better both for users with special needs and those
> > without them. The former can find all the settings they need in one
> > place, the latter will not be needlessly confused by things that do
> > not apply to them.
> 
> I disagree that there is any "needless" confusion in providing 5 to 6
> additional themes, which is all that including the 'accessibility'
> themes in the general-purpose 'metatheme' capplet would do.
> 
> > In summary, overloading themes and accessibility settings onto one
> > feature is neither necessary nor desirable, and will lead to a
> > suboptimal user experience for both features.
> 
> This is a misconception.  What we are proposing is very simple (the
> XP-type UI and capabilities), except that we see no reason to hide some
> of the available themes from end-users.

Disagree. The proposed meta-setting capplet is not simple. It adds an
extra layer of indirection/abstraction to the setting system.

-Seth