[orca-list] A bit OT: Low-vision Theme Editing (Was: Orca Fails in Studio)

[Veli-Pekka Tätilä]

Hi Henrik,
About the meta packages, I've heard about those and it sounds like a good 
idea. the one thing I'm still wondering is, do the kernel tweaks also come 
in that bunch? I read somewhere that the Studio Kernel has been optimized 
for low-latency audio operation. Having gotten used to 5 ms latencies here, 
this would be an important consideration when switching.

about the dark Studio theme, which file is it and can I copy it to a stock 
Ubuntu system easily? I would like to experiment with the visuals using the 
Feisty live cD which speaks with my non-audio laptop, though. I would liek 
to make a custom color scheme for my sight which might also benefit other 
people, I hope. however, this is much harder than it should be.

The only proper theme editors I've seen have been for KDE which is close to 
the kind of previewable theme editing I've gotten used to since, wait, 95. 
For Gnome it seems I have to learn some custom XML dialect and even so it is 
not immediately apparent where all the colors get used. I hav been unable to 
Google up any very useful reference document or theme editing tutorial so 
far, having tried to find enough info for a couple of times. It would seem 
to me the whole Gnome philosophy is heavily against proper customizability, 
which I find inherently annoying, as I do like to customize when I know what 
I'm doing.

I'm not sure if this is applicable to a larger bunch of folks, but I have 
never particularly liked any of the high contrast themes that come with any 
Major OS. There are two basic problems. firstly, contrast is too dazzlingly 
high. and secondly, there is very little brightness difference between major 
UI elements such as text field and window background contrasted against 
dialog background, push buttons and title bars.

My ideal scheme would be close to something like:
- white on dark blue for text fields and windows
- black on dark turquoise for dialog background
- white on black or black on cyan title bars depending on focus
- white on dark green push buttons
- black interior for check boxes, radio buttons, etc...with the pushed state 
being white or cyan
- Not to mention, the hoverred or focused elements should have inverse 
colors. Inverse in the sense of inverting R; G and B separately as opposed 
to merely the luminance.

NOw the ironic thing is:
Only LInux desktops are flexible enough to do something like that. But only 
LInux desktops are hard enough to edit to make this still something I'm 
looking into at low, idle priority. Windows makes editing easy, but is 
depressingly limiting. And the Mac has no editing at all.

PS: It took me ages, but using some of the principles I've outlined above. I 
once edited the Winamp skin magnified in Paint Shop Pro. Standard controls 
are the best, of course, but if some linux player does not use them and 
takes Winamp skins, too, perhaps this might be useful to somebody:

http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/winamp_access.html

-- 
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila at mail.student.oulu.fi)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/

Henrik Nilsen Omma wrote:
<snip>>
> It seems there are several metapackages you can install from the stock
> ubuntu to get the studio functionality, such as ubuntustudio-audio.
> That can serve as a solution in the short term at least. type 'apt-get
> install ubuntustudio-audio ubuntustudio-audio-plugins' at a command
> line or use synaptic.
>
> The Ubuntu Studio theme is actually quite high contrast (and inverse)
> so with bigger fonts it might be quite usable.
<snip>