Accessibility issues in the new theme

[Charlie Kravetz]

On Sun, 11 Apr 2010 15:37:44 -0400
Thomas Jaeger <thjaeger at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> 
> 

It was addressed directly in the bug. 

-- 
Charlie Kravetz 
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