Making the Plasma panel/task manager more usable without relying on colour alone?

[Prajna Sariputra]

Hi all,

Currently out of the box the only differentiator between active/focused and inactive tasks in the panel appear to be the colour, so with multiple things open it can be hard to see which task is the focused one, especially for those who might have some form of colour blindness. While for most people it could be mitigated by picking a brighter colour, changing themes, moving tasks to other virtual desktops and so on I think it would still be good to avoid Breeze (and in turn Plasma out of the box) being only usable by those who have good colour vision.

A possible solution would be to add a difference in shape as well, so perhaps something like [1], where unfocused apps have a smaller version of the line other panel applets have when clicked, while the focused app has a background colour, outline as well as the longer version of the top line. Of course, that exact design would likely not fit well with the rest of Breeze but it could serve as a starting point.

I guess part of the problem here is that for the task manager there are three possible states for each icon (not running, unfocused, focused), and giving unfocused vs focused apps more contrast could instead make differentiating unfocused and not running apps more difficult.

So, I'm wondering if there was already some discussion in the past regarding how this could be improved, the tradeoffs, and so on? Given accessibility is one of KDE's current goals, and in the past there was a bug report about this that was closed as intentional [2], I thought it might be a good idea to bring this to the accessibility team and see if this could be considered an accessibility issue as opposed to just stylistic preference. There has also been a Reddit post about it recently [3], although the wording on it might not have been the best.

Either way, I have been a happy user of KDE software for a few years now, so I appreciate all the work being put (and has been put) into this, and from the accessibility standpoint I also like the window border/outline that was introduced in 5.27, which is another reason why I thought bringing this possible issue up here might be a good idea.


Thanks,

Prajna Sariputra


[1]: https://imgur.com/dtxx32J
[2]: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455746
[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/12205ol/why_the_default_panel_ux_fails_and_how_to_fix_it/