Re: [PATCH] Fancy rc startup style RFC

Bill Vermillion wrote:
While stranded on the shoulder of the Information
Superhiway and trying to flag down some passing bytes
freebsd-hackers-request@xxxxxxxxxxx said "Bits don't fail me now",
and continued with:

Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2006 13:03:57 -0400
From: "Coleman Kane" <zombyfork@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Fancy rc startup style RFC

On 4/19/06, Mike Meyer <mwm-keyword-freebsdhackers.102a7e@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In
<346a80220604190900i3bfc3b54v93a4c6c30f0dfc4f@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Coleman Kane <zombyfork@xxxxxxxxx> typed:

On 4/19/06, Mike Meyer
<mwm-keyword-freebsdhackers.102a7e@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

How about we all discuss good choices for "default" colors?

Depends on the goal: do you want the default to work for
everyone, or do you want the default to be prettier and/or
better for most people but absolutely suck for a few?

I was thinking perhaps of having a predefined set of templates
(with the option and documentation to add your own). Perhaps
implement one that creates the "traffic-light" style that seems
to make intuitive sense to many americans (Bold Red: error, Bold
Green: Success, Bold Yellow: warning/notice), and also have
another perdefined one that uses a different color set.

"Traffic-light" style is also designed to be useable by completely
color-blind people - which is rare. By that if you notice traffic
lights are always in the same order, green, yellow, red so that all
you have to do is be able to see the luminance value in the
abscence of any chroma information..

That's the problem with web-sites which depend on chroma value, and
often have colors which are easily discernable by normally sighted
people, but the luminance is very close which can make things
almost invisible.

I have a noticed a traffic-sign problem which another person also
wrote to the local newspaper - and the traffic division is looking
to change the signs.

In Florida bright days are indeed very bright. There are signs
that use lights to spell out the message with what someone feels
the most important part in 'red'. The signs have a black
background.

On a bright day I see "NO TURN ON " or "TO PEDS" as the word RED in the first message is invisible to me, and the YIELD in the second has the same effect.

There is also a sign that I came up to that used the universal
sign for turn. I started to turn and my wife had me stop because
the circle with bar through it was in RED and I could not see it.

On overcast days or at night these signs are easily viewable.

For those of you who remember the late 1980s when IBM came out with
OS/2 and MS came out with a new Windows, the complaints were the
default screens on OS/2 were drab while the Windows had bright
colors. IBM is very good at designing things for people with
disabilites and the OS/2 default screen was designed to be readable
by someone with total color-blindness - which as I said is rare.

The way to check if a web-site is readable by all it to use
a monochrome monitor [ exceedingly hard to find nowdays ], and at least some government sites are now required to be that way.

Color can be a great way to emphasize items >IF< the chroma
and luminance values are carefully chosen. If not you can take
away a lot of functionality.

Bill - thanks for all the info here. I feel it's important for this to work for users with all kinds of vision differences, so can you confirm (or not) whether the b/w version (rc_fancy="YES", but rc_fancy_color="NO") looks readable to you? (please use patch 7)

Thanks!
Eric



--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Eric Anderson Sr. Systems Administrator Centaur Technology
Anything that works is better than anything that doesn't.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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