Re: REMINDER: GEP-2 discussion end date

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On Thu, 2002-09-26 at 14:38, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> <bordoley msu edu> writes:
> > 
> > I'm not sure if this has been discussed in this thread or not, but I think
> > this issue may be a rare case where accessibility requirements contradict with
> > general usability. I for one do not want to see a melding of all "appearance"
> > related capplets (ie. font, theme, background etc.). However for users with
> > accessibility concerns having all the "look and feel" options in one
> > convenient place is probably a requirement. So I'm wondering if a compromise
> > can be met. What I'm thinking is that we keep the current capplets but add an
> > additional appearance capplet to the accessibility preferences menus which
> > provides all of these options in a way that meets the requirements of users
> > for whom accessibility is an issue. Thoughts?
> > 
> 
> Well, I still have some hope we could have a nice simple metatheme
> feature like Windows XP does...

WinXPs metatheme feature is way more complicated than it would need to
be if it were just a THEME feature rather than a "capplet that changes
preferences that live elsewhere" (aka "metatheme") feature. I still see
no reason other than accesibility to make the theme capplet control any
settings except appearance of buttons, icons, borders, etc. To provide
more expression to theme authors we can even add buttons that allow
users to explicitly select non-theme elements that the theme author
suggests are complimentary (such as backgrounds).

See:

http://www.gnome.org/~seth/theme-set-editor.png
http://www.gnome.org/~seth/theme-set-selector.png

The caveat with this interface is that it requires a hack to work with
accesibility (namely accesibility theme's recommendations get
automatically applied rather than just showing up as recommendations).
The alternative, which I strongly suggest in support of DaveB, Maciej,
and others is to not try conflate the accesibility features needed here
into theme features. I think this is shifting the whole definition of
what a theme is, and certainely changing what a reasonable interface is.

-Seth