Following the discussions on GNOME developer mailing lists[1], there seems to be a consensus that it would be a good idea for applications to have the option of installing a high contrast icon for accessibility purposes. GNOME currently maintains all its accessibility icons in a separate icon theme, but it was agreed that this was too onerous a task to keep up to date. I propose that we add a note to the current icon theme spec to let developers know about the HighContrast theme in the same way we currently do with the hicolor theme. This would probably consist of two paragraphs. The first to explain where and how to install the icon, and a second to give some guidelines on creating good high contrast icons. I have made up a rough draft of this as follows:
Applications that wish to include accessibility icons can do so by installing a high contrast icon into the HighContrast theme. To do this, a PNG file can be copied to $prefix/share/icons/HighContrast/48x48/apps. You may also want to include other sizes, or perhaps install an SVG version in $prefix/share/icons/HighContrast/scalable/apps instead. High contrast icons should be designed such that they are visible on a black backgrounds, as well as white. The icons should also designed such that they can be easily inverted to create a High Contrast Invert themes. I am also CC'ing the maintainers of the GNOME High Contrast theme to get their comments on how to go about creating good high contrast icons. If there are no serious objections to this, and after any comments and suggestions about the design guidelines, I will make up a patch for the spec. -Thomas [1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2005-November/msg00167.html _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg
