[Kde-accessibility] Monochrome Icons

[Bill Haneman]

Hi Danny:

Thanks a lot for doing these icons, the set looks really good.

A couple of suggestions - if you can avoid the use of thin lines it will
help the visibility overall.  In many cases the thin lines don't really
add much information, and for users who need high contrast they have the
effect of "muddying" the icon sometimes.  Also, a contrasting border may
help for situations where the icon needs to be displayed against a
black, rather than white, background.  

When you consider a high contrast theme overall, your various "colors"
for states like 'selected' and 'toggled' need to be high contrast too,
so 'selected' might be nearly inverse video.  In order for your icons to
be visible in this case, a contrasting border (again, not too narrow)
can help a lot.

It occurs to me that since we have a freedesktop.org shared icon spec
now, it might be nice to actually share icon themes for accessibility. 
While KDE, GNOME, and other free desktops will want to have distinctive
"looks" in their default theme, it doesn't seem so important to me that
KDE and GNOME have different high contrast icon sets (for instance), and
a shared set might have other accessibility advantages too.  CVS package
gnome-themes has the GNOME high-contrast icon sets if anyone wants to
take a look.

Jimmac did the original set, and put together a nice page on them:
http://jimmac.musichall.cz/doc/high-contrast/html/index.xhtml
They aren't SVG, but he discusses principles of how to create them.

We have a page about designing accessible icons in the GNOME
Accessibility Project pages too:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/draft_hig_new/icons-design-accessible.html
but in some ways I think Jimmac's explanations are even better! 

:-)

best regards,

Bill

On Sun, 2004-11-28 at 19:51, Danny Allen wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
> I am creating a monochrome version of my Flat iconset for accessibility 
> purposes - following on from my preview that I recently posted to the 
> kde-accessibility list, I have produced a working preview release of the set:
> 
> http://kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=18317
> 
> I used a script to modify the colours of my original set, then modified many 
> of them by hand, to get the correct look - however, many still need human 
> attention/reworking, including the whole "actions" section.
> 
> Anyway, tell me what you think (I understand a lot of work needs to be done, 
> but I think it shows promise :)
> 
> Danny
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