Re: Control center and capplet merging



Luka said:

Il giorno lun, 27/06/2005 alle 17.08 +0100, Calum Benson ha scritto:

...

One advantage it would have would be for accessibility... it's pretty
common to want to change both together if you need a High Contrast Large Print theme, for example. (And personally, the first thing I do when I install a Linux machine is to change both the font and the theme, and then I pretty much never touch either of them again, so I've always wanted them in the same dialog anyway...)

This is a personal "taste", and I suppose you are an experienced
computer user as everyone on this mailing list. The last time i opened
the Font capplet to change something was... humm.. 2 years ago...
IMHO it's better to keep them separated for average (and sub-average)
users, so they can simply discover them. Reading Appearance in the
Preferences list, do you think everyone can figure that it's the place
to tune fonts?
Well, I think we will continue to disagree. I have certainly seen users who were confused by the fact that fonts weren't included in the Theme capplet.

I see that a separate Accessibility capplet is proposed as well, though, so perhaps this wouldn't be an issue any more anyway, depending on its precise contents. (Although I'm not sure if capplets that affect values in other capplets are such a great idea either, but that's probably a separate argument...)

Well, for this kind of needs i was thinking about something like the
attached mochup[1]. Of course it overlaps the Theme, Font and Background
capplets, and sets more keys with a single widget[2], but if you need to
setup an environment for impaired users it's quick and simple.
I don't agree with your assessment #2 below, about 'same size' everywhere, or that Sans is always the right choice. There are for instance special fonts (one is called 'Tiresias' and I believe it's free/open) designed for visual problems. But of course one size doesn't really fit all.

I think that an even better solution for this is a sort of "user profile" capplet that does something similar, but goes even further, to change the gconf/Xsettings defaults for a whole load of things at once (not just visuals). This would be useful outside of accessibility, especially if users could fine tune and store these profiles for later. So for instance, you could select the choice for "high contrast with magnification" (assistive tech support, fullscreen magnifier, high contrast theme, different window manager behavior perhaps, etc.), or "high visibility" (high contrast, larger versions of fonts, using a font selected for easy visibility, simple background), etc. Or "onscreen keyboard user", or ...

Or "laptop user" (fonts/theme suited to LCD display, different power settings, etc.) or "presentation (1024 x 768)" with font and theme settings that look good when projected, etc. And of course this would be ideal for shared logins like kiosks and libraries etc., you could lock down or hide most gconf keys and expose only the 'profiles' mechanism, or at least use profiles to re-set the system to reasonable defaults if someone tweaks things all weirdly.

regards

Bill

1. Strings suck, I know


2. i.e. I believe that activating the "Using computer I've difficulties
with font size" option, the system should use Sans font at the same size
everywhere (window border, desktop, applications..)





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