Re: [Usability] Alternatives to hardcoded colors

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On Aug 29, 2008, at 1:11 PM, Benjamin Berg wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-08-29 at 11:52 +0400, Nickolay V. Shmyrev wrote:
> > В Чтв, 28/08/2008 в 22:03 -0400, Jeff пишет:
> > > I know that a lot of applications are in this situation. I would like
> > > your input as to what could be done to be able to indicate 3-4 levels
> > > of "priority" while still retaining an application that is not 
> > > heavily theme-dependent for being legible (I'm also thinking of 
> > > other
> > > applications such as Homebank, Specto, etc.), especially in GTK
> > > listviews or treeviews.

It's a basic technique in Web design that if an author sets their own 
foreground color for anything, to avoid unreadable text they should set 
the background color too, and vice versa.
<http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/color>

The same applies to a GTK application. If it uses custom text colors in 
a text field or list, it should use a custom background color too. As 
Ross Burton described, this usually won't be necessary for Tasks since 
it uses theme colors by default, but if you set custom text colors, 
then Tasks should set a custom background color to suit.

> Using icons may be the best way to go in some cases.

Using icons is probably a good idea for accessibility reasons, because 
color shouldn't be the only way of communicating something. But it 
should still be *available* for applications to use. Color is too 
valuable a tool to be sacrificed on the altar of theme independence.

> I do not know much about the needs of the HighContrast themes. But I
> wonder if it is even possible to define good colours for "3-4 different
> levels of priority" in an accessibility theme (depending on the use
> case, one colour + bold could already give enough combinations).
> ...

Priority is only a very small subset of the reasons an application 
might benefit from color. For example, XChat and Gobby (in different 
ways) color-code individual people, making it much easier to find the 
previous and next utterances of a particular person. Partition Editor 
color-codes partitions of different filesystem types. And Banshee uses 
color to display how much of your portable music player storage is used 
by music, videos, podcasts etc.

> ...
> I see colours schemes for themes and named colours for the application
> as two entirely different issues. They do happen to use the same
> technology in the end of course. However the colours for applications 
> do not need to be user selectable. It would be great to have a couple 
> of colours that applications can use. The hard part is to find a good 
> set of colours, and then standardise these colours.
> ...

I don't think that could possibly work. It certainly wouldn't work for 
XChat and Gobby; and for the other examples, any list of named colors 
large enough to include names like "filesystem_type_ext2" and 
"device_usage_podcasts" would be too massive to be useful.

Cheers
--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/


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