Re: REMINDER: GEP-2 discussion end date

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org>]

On 27Sep2002 02:43PM (+0100), Bill Haneman wrote:
> 
> Note however that XP does something rather odd, which personally I think
> is a silly idea: it exposes special accessibility themes (under the
> checkbox "high contrast", then you need the "settings" button) from the
> "Accessibility->Display" dialog, although there is really no functional
> difference between that dialog and the "Display" theme dialog.  In fact
> if you select one of the "accessibility themes", then go to the
> "Display" dialog (e.g. the metatheme dialog), you can "Save As..." and
> then access your "accessibility theme" from the regular metathemer.  So
> why not just list it there in the first place ?
> 
> This seems like both unnecessary duplication, and pointless
> inconsistency.  The only reason I can see for omitting them is the fact
> that there are so many of them in XP, but we could have a "hide
> accessibility themes" checkbox or something, and dispense with the
> unnecessary extra dialog.

I draw the opposite conclusion - I think this indicates that
overloading accessibility settings onto the theme feature in Windows
was a mistake. I would guess the reason they did this was so that
users who do not have special needs would not be exposed to
accessibility-specific themes at all, and so that users who do need
them would find them in the logical place, "Accessibility".

But really, the confusion comes about because themes and accessibility
share implementation.

But as I mentioned before, this is not the only way to do it. In Mac
OS X, the accessibility settings are completely separate from theme
settings, and can be applied without affecting the user's chosen theme
or other display settings. It's also possible to turn on both screen
magnification and white on black display separately, for instance.

I think this works better both for users with special needs and those
without them. The former can find all the settings they need in one
place, the latter will not be needlessly confused by things that do
not apply to them.

In summary, overloading themes and accessibility settings onto one
feature is neither necessary nor desirable, and will lead to a
suboptimal user experience for both features.

Regards,

Maciej