Icon Theme Spec + High Contrast Icons

[Thomas Wood]

Calum Benson wrote:
> 
> (Snipping Suzanna, who no longer works at Sun, and adding Bill who I  
> don't think is on the XDG list.)
> 
> On 26 Nov 2005, at 14:42, Thomas Wood wrote:
> 
>>    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.
> 
> 
> The HIG already includes design guidelines for high contrast icons:
> http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/draft_hig_new/icons- 
> design-accessible.html

This is much better than my one paragraph attempt. Should we link to the 
page, or create an extra section in the spec for this?

> 
> Some other thoughts:
> 
> - There's also the question of low contrast icons, but I think it was  
> previously suggested that they'd be better rendered on the fly (by  
> adjusting the colour values of the 'regular') by a low contrast theme  
> engine.  Does this still sound plausible/sensible to everyone?

Creating the low contrast icons can be done automatically as you 
suggest, so I don't think it would be a good idea to burden developers 
with having to do more work to get their application "accessible" than 
is strictly necessary.

> 
> - The high and low contrast icon themes still have separate large  print 
> versions, but since they're identical to the regular versions,  they're 
> now hidden in the UI (rather than not installed at all,  because of 
> potential upgrade problems described in http:// 
> bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=168977).  Should we mention that  the 
> large print versions of the high and low contrast icon themes are  
> deprecated?  (Or does anyone have any thoughts on how we can  gracefully 
> get rid of them altogether?)

I noticed that the "HighContrast" icon theme in GNOME is actually blank, 
and it is the icons in HighContrastLargePrint that are actually used. I 
would suggest we swap this and depreciate the LargePrint versions. I 
think we will have to bite the bullet on the 'upgrade path' problem and 
just remove them. The worst case is someone will just have to re-select 
the high contrast icon theme from the theme capplet.

However, this is a GNOME issue that needs to be addressed separately. 
For the purposes of the icon theme spec, I think we should stick to just 
HighContrast and not mention the others.

-Thomas