Accessibility issues in the new theme

[Thomas Jaeger]

Kenneth,

Could you please address the issues that have been raised in bug
#532641?  As far as I can tell, there are no technical reasons for
keeping the window controls at a fixed size.

Thanks,
Tom

On 04/05/2010 04:40 PM, Thomas Jaeger wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm not sure how to get the theme developers' attention, so I'll try
> this mailing list.  I feel that the new theme is a step backwards in
> terms of accessibility, making ubuntu harder to use for people with
> less-than-perfect eye sight, user of high-resolution screens and people
> who use their laptop in adverse lighting conditions (e.g. sunlight).
> 
> There are two main issues with that I have with the current design of
> the theme.  The first issue is the size of window decorations.  When
> increasing the size of the title bar font (or the dpi settings), the
> window decorations don't scale up accordingly [1].  This makes it
> unnecessarily hard to hit the close, minimize or maximize button and
> increases the chances of hitting the wrong one.  This is exacerbated by
> the fact that there is no visual indication of whether the close button
> is currently pushed down.  The rationale for this is supposed to be that
> metacity doesn't support scaling buttons, but I found this not to be
> true in my own testing (see [1]).
> 
> The second issue is contrast:  It just doesn't make any sense to me why
> text should be gray-on-white instead of black-on-white.  Having less
> contrast means you have to crank up display brightness while on battery,
> wasting precious battery life or causing more eye strain.  It is quite
> shocking to me how much clearer text on the screen becomes if I adjust
> the colors so that text appears black.  This might not be much of a
> concern on current monitors, which don't have to sacrifice backlight
> brightness for power consumption, but it is on most laptops.
> 
> Thanks,
> Tom
> 
> [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/light-themes/+bug/532641