[Kde-accessibility] Icon effect for monochrome icons

[Gunnar Schmi Dt]

Hello,

During akademy I have experimented with some algorithms that produce 
monochrome icons from standard (colored) icons. One of the algorithms 
produces quite acceptable results, and so I have now produced patches for 
kdelibs and kdebase that add this icon effect to the list of standard icon 
sets.

Basically the algorithm works as follows: It first calculates an average 
brightness of the icon. In a second step everything darker than the 
average gets painted in the foreground color and everything lighter than 
the average gets painted in the background color.

In order to define the foreground and background color I have decided to 
produce two versions of the patch (and I would like to hear some feedback 
about which version is better suited for the inclusion in KDE 3.4):

The first version (kdelibs.diff and kdebase.diff) uses the color defined 
with the icon effect as the foreground color and the standard background 
color from the color scheme as the background color. This has the 
disadvantage that it adds a dependency between the color scheme and the 
icon theme (everytime when the color scheme changes the icons need to be 
re-loaded). The current version of this patch does simply ignore this 
additional dependency.

The second version (kdelibs2.diff and kdebase2.diff) adds an additional 
second color to the icon effect, so that both colors are defined with the 
icon effect. This has the advantage that it does not add a dependency 
between the color scheme and the icon theme, but it also requires some 
more changes to the API (i.e., the second color needs to be added).

A problem that remains with both versions is that the selected icons are 
calculated by applying some standard icon effect to the icon (The icon is 
overlaid with the color for the selected background). While this is ok in 
most situations it is not ideal for high contrast icons (where you might 
want to have full control of the resulting colors). However, in order to 
change this we would need to apply some big changes to both the algorithms 
that load the icons and to the kdecore API, so that this is not feasible 
for KDE 3.4.


In either case this icon effect does not replace the need for a high 
contrast icon theme that is useable for low-vision users. It rather is 
intended to both colorize such a high contrast icon theme in colors that 
match the color theme and for "incorporating" icons that are missing in 
the high contrast icon theme (and otherwise would be painted as they are 
with all colors).

Gunnar Schmi Dt
-- 
Co-maintainer of the KDE Accessibility Project
Maintainer of the kdeaccessibility package
http://accessibility.kde.org/
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