Easy Gnome Themming - High-Contrast Is No Good for Me

[Veli-Pekka Tätilä]

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 (vtatila at mail.student.oulu.fi)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/