[Kde-accessibility] experimental idea with colour fonts

[michel]

Dear Reinhard

About the colour fonts, it is meant to be experimental.
the details depend on your situation.
It is meant, that it will be used in combination with other methods.
Not just that on it's own.

Maybe you misunderstood the strategy here. Basically, we just redefine the 
alphabet, to what ever it's easier on the senses of the user. 

We don't try to make the shapes of the letters easier to see. We largely 
ignore the shapes. The idea is, that the user sees a colourful string of 
blurry letters, and deciphers the meaning by knowing the colour code (that he 
defined). Combination with other methods of course is not forbidden.

for example, if every "a" is red. When you see a red smug, you know that 
there's a "a" there. Additionally, it can have it's own background colour. 
Say, a red "a" with a blue background. Using a single colour for every letter 
might be too difficult to distinguish between them. During the learning phase, 
if you can't read something, you can use the lens to refresh your memory. When 
the knew colour alphabet is learned, you can use different "fonts", say 
rectangles or triangles, in order to amplify the visibility of the colours and 
increase screen density of readable text. The exact colour scheme should be 
chosen carefully by the user, or they will be "dyslexia" kind of problems with 
colours been mixed up.....

.... Do you want to be our guinea pig? We'll send you some experimental 
scripts for testing and you tell us how it's going....

About what you said about windows. In KDE, you can invert the colours and 
track the mouse already. It inverts the colours of the entire system, so 
individual applications aren't an issue. And there is also a lens..... and 
automated reading and other stuff. I'm pretty sure the other Linux GUIs do all 
that also. I think Linux already does every thing that is standard in 
accessibility. And this is why it's not a bad idea, to try something new... :P

regards

Michel

On Sunday 21 September 2014 20:48:49 Reinhard Thies wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am a visually impaired user. Changing the background to black and have a
> white font is very helpful for me. But many application do not support it.
> they simply ignore system settings.
> I can only see a small area of the screen and therefore the tracking mouse
> pointer and the circles around the mouse pointer when you press control are
> wonderful things, available in Windows OS. These are the things which would
> make life easier.
> 
> thanks
> Reinhard
> 
> On Sunday 21 September 2014 13:17:38 Heiko Tietze wrote:
> > > 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/
> > _______________________________________________
> > kde-accessibility mailing list
> > kde-accessibility at kde.org
> > https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-accessibility
> 
> _______________________________________________
> kde-accessibility mailing list
> kde-accessibility at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-accessibility