[Kde-accessibility] how blue must blue be for blue-on-yellow color scheme?

[Matthew Blissett]

Matthew Woehlke wrote:

> (re-post to kde-a11y from kde-u7y... after noticing gmane has the wrong
> address...)
> 
> Ok, so I keep hearing that blue-on-yellow colors are for a11y
> specifically... that being the case, I suppose I'm going to go ahead and
> add that scheme to kdea11y.
> 
> What doesn't entirely make sense to me is what's wrong with
> white-on-black for most cases (rod deficiencies as opposed to cone
> deficiencies, where someone can tell about colors but not lightnesses?).
> Anyway... how important is it that the blue be #0000ff as opposed to
> #0000c0 and there-abouts?
> 
> Put another way, would the scheme in [1] (that tries to balance being
> blue-on-yellow with "something that won't cause blindness in 'normal'
> people ;-)") be adequate, or do things really, really need to be
> #ffff00-on-#0000ff?
> 
> 1: http://img178.imageshack.us/img178/3632/olympusrh8.png
> 
> Matt Blissett helpfully noted the following bugs, which can be
> overlooked for answering this question:
> 
> - my Xephyr+kwin doesn't paint buttons correctly
> - Oxygen uses a very bad color for progress bars
> 
> He also noted that the selection could use more contrast (actually,
> there is already more contrast than in the KDE3 version, but it's still
> not very good). What's the safest way to do that; make the selection
> lighter, or everything else darker? Or is it "good enough" and changing
> it is likely to cause problems?

It was mentioned elsewhere that the scheme was for red/green colour
blindness, so I asked a red/green colour-blind friend, who told me the
contrast isn't a problem since colour blind people see contrast better. 
But he said the selected text doesn't show up much, and that "Allows the
manipulation of widget..." is hard to read and the unpressable "Apply"
button is particularly bad.
He concluded that it's far less comfortable than the standard KDE theme.

Of course, this is only one person (who presumably wouldn't choose this
theme), but it might be worth checking exactly what's needed, i.e. who the 
yellow-on-blue is for.

-- 
Matt
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