Re: Red cursor with text deletion below ...

On Mon, 5 Jul 2004, Dom Lachowicz wrote:

<snip>

> > > -the red cursor is a BAD idea. remember there are
> > people that are color
> > > blind

colour alone is not idea but combining it with size shape or texture
provides an effective balance.

> > It's a _good_ idea (at least for non-color blind people; maybe we
> > should change the appearance of it a bit as well for these cases).
> > People actually know now that something has changed (the switch to
> > overwrite mode).

> Providing visual feedback (such as changing the
> caret's color) is a *good* idea. Perhaps we should
> make the caret N times wider than a normal cursor as
> well.

At the time I thought the cursor was also going to be changed from
Verticle to Horizontal just under the letter (or a block, like a single
letter being selected) but even just the extra visual feedback of changing
to red has made it significantly easier for users to identify and describe
the problem which makes it easier for us to understand and provide them
with a helpful answer.

> The red color is a visual feedback. It is not wrong to
> use color as a visual feedback, even though there are
> color-blind people in the world. (OT: Red-Green color
> blindness is by far the most common type of color
> blindness. Such a person wouldn't have much trouble
> telling our red caret from a black one). The problem
> is when it is the *only* feedback given. Clearly this
> is not the case, as AbiWord also has:
>
> 1) "Ins" changed to "Ovr" in the status bar

Thanks to Paul for filing a bug report to track his request to allow
changing between INS/OVR by clicking on that status bar message.
http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=7042

> 2) The behavior of entering a character changes
> and the proposed
> 3) Making the caret wider

I'd be surprised if this is there weren't other issues we dont even know
about that have a greater effect on the accessibility of Abiword than the
cursor colour (bugs we do know include:
3124, Problems with AbiWord and a Screen Reader
3468, Problems inserting text using voice recognition software
5523, problems with icon theming).

from a recent discussion I know that being able to set the background
colour differntly from the page colour to be printed is a very useful
accesibility feature for users that are sensitive bright lights.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
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Received on Mon Jul 5 18:09:23 2004