[Kde-accessibility] experimental idea with colour fonts

[Heiko Tietze]

> Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 14:57:32 +0200
> From: michel <okgomdjgbmoij at gmail.com>
> To: kde-accessibility at kde.org
> Subject: Re: [Kde-accessibility] experimental idea with colour fonts
> Message-ID: <2938529.DRQYV238BH at mike-ep31-ds3l>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
> 
> i somehow made a little kate script ... that is now broken. (i made some
> blurred and normal screen shots, to demonstrate that you can decipher the
> letters if you know the colour code used, despite been impossible to see
> their shapes)

I like those ideas, in particular when they can get tested easily. Katepart 
(that means the following works in Kate and KWrite etc.) has an elaborated 
highlighting [1], which is easy to modify. (This is my first attempt to create 
a syntax highlighting file; for sure there is much room for improvement.)

1. Download the highlight definitions from http://pastebin.com/GzkH7AJb
2. Place it at ~/.kde4/share/apps/katepart/syntax/ (create the syntax folder 
if it doesn't exists) under the name coloredtext.xml
3. (Re)start Kate, go to Extra > Highlighting > Markup and select "Colored 
Text"
4. Download the color scheme from http://pastebin.com/GsVSw3JY and save it 
anywhere under the name coloredtext.katehlcolor
5. In Kate/KWrite go to Settings > Fonts & Colors, tab "Styles for 
highlighting", find Markup/Colored Text at the dropdown (if not selected) and 
load the color definition via "Import" from the downloaded file

Now every letter gets its own color. And you can modify the scheme as you want

Beside from the technical solution I believe it makes sense to define the 
highlighting carefully. The proof-of-concept scheme is just multicolored 
without any concept. What I have in mind is to put syllables or rather 
phonemes into foreground, and to move less important letters backward (vocals 
for instance).
But perhaps an individual solution would be even better. For a scientific study 
I would measure eye fixations and highlight those parts later that got special 
attention, that means a high number or long duration of fixations. 
Unfortunately the resolution and framerate of inbuilt webcams is not sufficient, 
as far as I know. So we cannot provide this as a generic accessibility tool.

Cheers,
Heiko.

[1] http://kate-editor.org/2005/03/24/writing-a-syntax-highlighting-file/