Re: My GEP 2 (metatheme) thoughts

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On Wed, 2002-09-25 at 14:19, Owen Taylor wrote:
> 
> Sorry for the last minute response here; I haven't had
> a lot of time recently with GTK+-2.2 work and other stuff.
> 
> First thought - 
> 
>  * Themes are about making your desktop look pretty
> 
> Right now, the use case of selecting a pre-canned theme that
> was created by a graphics artist isn't even in the GEP!
> (Requirement 2.1.1.3 sort of gets at this issue, but other
> than that, it seems to be an afterthought)
> 
> That's not to say that that selecting accessibility options
> isn't important, or that it isn't related to themes, but if
> we distort the idea of a theme too much (as a straw man, say
> having a theme that starts up the magnifier) then we've
> created a serious usability problem for users without
> special accessibility themes.
> 
 
Hi Owen,

Maciej voiced this a month or so ago, and I'm coming to the same
conclusion. The interface I design for themes sans the accesibility
requirements is substantially different from the conclusions people seem
to be coming to as to a good interface that handles all the accesibility
stuff. Nils in particular dislikes the inelegant hack I made to the
interface to secretly allow only accesibility themes to make what I
consider non-theme-like changes (such as changing the font or font
size). 

This in my mind all points that the accesibility features we're trying
to add to the theming system are in many ways orthogonal to theming in
the non-accesibility realm, and its a critical mistake to try and put
them both in the same interface. We're collapsing similar but in the end
very different feature sets together. Inevitably when you have two
different necessary feature sets one or both are going to be severely
compromised. The way things are going now, my opinion is that usability
for the non-accesibility case is being compromised. The proposed
interfaces are dramatically more complex than what I have proposed
(which doesn't do the accesibility stuff without a hack).

I think the necessary accesibility features should be controlled from a
preference page in the accesibility section. This would allow an
interface that's better tailored to user's who need the accesibility
features, and would allow for the simpler definite state theme mechanism
without the extra weirdness of tying in things like fonts etc (which
result in the theme capplet being some sort of meta-setting capplet that
changes settings that live elsewhere).

-Seth