"I once had a guy who wasn't telling younger team members that he wasn't able to read their document due to too small fonts. We are talking C level executives here..."
You mean he was embarrassed to admit he could not read small fonts ? How small we talking here bellow 12 point size ? On Tue, Aug 29, 2017 at 11:28 AM p...@highoctane.be <p...@highoctane.be> wrote: > White all over Smalltalks UIs are a reason why I do *not* use them. > > Dark Pharo: good. > > Properly themeable Pharo with a palette and logical color mappings: > nirvana. I hope to contribute to that. I did some GToolkit dark theming > but it was too late for 6.0 so maybe for 7. > > Try to code against a white background when you have floaters casting > shadows on your retina. I sucks big time. > > I noticed that a lot of older folk suffer from this. > > I once had a guy who wasn't telling younger team members that he wasn't > able to read their document due to too small fonts. We are talking C level > executives here... > > These accessibility issues are going to become huge with people getting > older and having cash to spend. > > From what I can so see, hearing problems will be quite a thing with newer > generations. > > Anyway, there is NegativeScreen on Windows to get whatever I want. > > http://arcanesanctum.net/negativescreen/ > > Phil > > > On Aug 29, 2017 6:02 AM, "Markus Stumptner" <m...@cs.unisa.edu.au> wrote: > >> On 28/08/17 06:07, Dimitris Chloupis wrote: >> >> >>> I completely agree - dark mode is great for content that you want to >>> look cool, but no one consumes. :-) >>> >> >> You assume wrong cause dark themes have been dominating GUIs for over 3 >> decades now. >> >> Not really; bright on dark was only dominant in the days of the CRT >> terminal when there were no "themes". (Even if you could do it as a >> hardware switch, setting, say, a VT220 to black-on-white both looked >> terrible as it was more an uneven gray, and tended to dim the tube more >> quickly by burning in the background.) >> >> Instead, since full bitmap graphics happened, all screen interfaces back >> to Xerox's prototype office systems, then Lisa/Macintosh, and then Windows >> 2.1 have been using dark type on a white background for text work. Partly >> this was because of the original office metaphor, but partly also because >> it was shown that it was easier (meaning, less error prone) to read. >> >> Here's a study that showed that participants were 26% more accurate in >> reading text that way (note that "contrast reversal" on displays in those >> days meant dark characters on white background): >> >> Bauer, D., & Cavonius, C., R. (1980). Improving the legibility of visual >> display units through contrast reversal. >> In E. Grandjean, E. Vigliani (Eds.), Ergonomic Aspects of Visual Display >> Terminals (pp. 137-142). >> London: Taylor & Francis >> >> There were other studies in the 1980s that didn't report lower errors but >> instead faster reading with black on white. Academically, the matter's >> pretty much considered settled - black on white is better for most of the >> population, and that's on screen, not on paper. (You can substitute any >> degree of light or creamy for the white, that's really a variation of >> screen quality.) >> The engineering workstations of the late 80s and 90s (Sun etc) used black >> and white as the application default as well, with white on black limited >> to console/shell windows. This was partly for consistency with the old >> style, partly for easy contrast with application windows in a multi-window >> environment. >> >> Pharo was the rare exception of using a white theme. Light themes may be >> popular but white are definitely not. The web is the last fort of bright >> themes, but the web was and still is eons behind when it comes to matters >> of UI. >> >> Most other Smalltalks are dark-on-light by default all the way back to >> Smalltalk-80 out of Xerox PARC. None of this had anything to do with the >> Web, which came after, but which obviously also profits from the same >> increase in readability. Rather than behind, Smalltalk was ahead and the >> rest of the world followed. >> >> The dark theme as default in Pharo I personally consider a step back. As >> someone who's been busy for 25+ years defending use of Smalltalk for real >> applications, a return to a primarily developer-cool presentation instead >> of a user-oriented default is IMO not a plus for a language branch that was >> billed as more industry-oriented (which IMO is not exactly the same as >> developer-oriented). But I also understand the desire to attract >> developers with the look that's currently fashionable. >> >> That said, I wonder if the recent preference for dark among developers >> (not Pharo-specific, but many languages) has to do with the rise of >> widespread code highlighting. I could see how colour highlighting shows up >> better on a dark background than being glared over by a white one. >> >> Markus >> >
