Homepage styles

[iamshadow]

Right now, there are four Site Schemes available for Dreamwidth users, all of which involve dark text on light backgrounds. As someone with visual sensitivities related to my Asperger's Syndrome, my ideal comfort is the opposite - light text on dark. It's one of the things that has bugged me about LJ for a long time; that there doesn't appear to be any way to make the main website light on dark, though it's easy enough to change my own journal and friends page to be that way, and to ?style=mine everyone else's.

Are there any plans to make a site skin that's light on dark?

Comments

[denise]

Yes, we have a light-on-dark sitescheme that's been created for us, which we want to make available for this very reason! We just need to get an appropriately color-swapped version of the logo first, and it's proving rather difficult to come up with a logo version that looks right against the colors of it.

[iamshadow]

That's good to know. Will it be announced on this comm when it's ready for launch?

[jadelennox]

we are still working out exactly what we want to do with this community, but announcing new accessibility features is definitely something we should be doing with it, I think.

(As a separate issue, do you know that many browsers will enable you to switch everything to color swap on a case-by-case basis? Opera has a whole lot of built-in accessibility styles, including one which is color swap, and the Firefox accessibility extension lets you do similar things. I'm pretty sure Opera lets you pick style by site, too. Those may not work for you for any number of reasons, but I figured it might be helpful in case you didn't know about them.)

[iamshadow]

I saw that, on an earlier thread. I haven't downloaded the Firefox extension yet, but I might have play with it at some point.

[gaspodia.livejournal.com]

As a separate issue, do you know that many browsers will enable you to switch everything to color swap on a case-by-case basis?

I'm guessing Internet Explorer isn't one of them? I'm stuck with that one for my work laptops but would find it visually more comfortable to be able to switch.

[jadelennox]

Internet explorer is generally crap at accessibility, but some people have made workarounds. I haven't tested this one, but it appears to be a stylesheet you can apply to Internet Explorer, if you have that much control over the work laptops.

[gaspodia.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that Jade. Sadly I have no control over my laptops, but I do have a high nuisance quotient according to our techies so they might be persuaded to put that in for me :)

Ooh, I might have spotted a bug there with my rubbish spelling - there is no gap between the first of the suggested words and my incorrectly spelled one.

[iamshadow]

If your main issue is visual sensitivity, there's also Mustacha's Irlen Filter, which you can set to the colour and tone of your choice and which covers everything you have open. It's free, and it's a tiny download.

[illuviel]

On behalf of my eyes and my brain, thank you for posting this.

[iamshadow]

Not a problem! I don't use it all the time, but I've found it really useful when I'm over-sensitive or getting a migraine.

[denise]

It'll be announced in dw_news; I'm sure rb will repeat it here.

[branchandroot]

You can see a screen shot of the light-on-dark scheme here: http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/Gradation_Site_Scheme

Actually, while I have you here, how vital do you feel it is to make the form input boxes (in search, tag management, etc.) also be light-on-dark? Next time I revise the style, should I make that a priority, or are they okay to stay dark-on-light?

[iamshadow]

Looks good so far!

The form input boxes might be fine as is, but I can't really tell until I've actually used the scheme, if that makes sense.

[branchandroot]

Makes plenty of sense. Once it's live, just make a post to this comm if you find that any of the contrast is being troublesome.

[sophie]

If you want to test it out before it goes live, try appending ?usescheme=gradation-vertical on the end of a site scheme page URL (or &usescheme=gradation-vertical if the URL already has a ? in it). For example, http://sophie.dreamwidth.org/profile?usescheme=gradation-vertical . It won't stick, but you can do that on any site schemed page to try that one out.

[iamshadow]

Okay, the inbox needs some tweaking. The background and the text colour for the menu are almost identical; you can only read the options if you mouse-over them. Also, the 'alternate' messages could do with being a mid-grey rather than white.

Everything else looks okay at a glance; the form input boxes aren't a problem for me, because they're not taking up the whole screen, but if you did go on and make them light grey, I wouldn't complain either. What I've found, for myself, is that I'm a lot more comfortable if things are not quite white. So, a very pale grey, or cream, or a very very light blue. So pale that you probably wouldn't know it wasn't white unless you compared the two. Stark white is just so glaring; sticking the tiniest bit of pigment in there seems to make it a lot more tolerable.