Re: High Contrast Icons

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Mon, 2005-11-21 at 22:40 +0000, Thomas Wood wrote:
> There has been a discussion on gnome-themes-list about how we can 
> improve the coverage of the high contrast icon theme. It was generally 
> agreed that it was unrealistic to try and maintain icons for every 
> application within GNOME in the high-contrast-theme itself. The 
> alternative is that individual applications should be responsible for 
> installing a high contrast icon into the high contrast theme.
> 
> If an application calls itself "accessible", having high contrast icons 
> should be one of the requirements. Applications are allowed to install 
> icons into the hicolor theme; if we're really taking accessibility 
> seriously, then high contrast themes should have a similar status to 
> hicolor.
> 
> The work for individual application maintainers is minimal. Most icons 
> can simple be removed from the high contrast theme and added to their 
> respective modules.
> 
> Does anyone have any comments on this idea, and how we can encourage 
> maintainers to include high contrast icons? Accessibility is one of the 
> cornerstones of GNOME, so it would be a shame to let it slip on this issue.

So I'm trying to figure out exactly what this would mean for
Yelp.  Yelp uses the gnome-help icon as its application icon,
but it doesn't ship that icon.  Instead, it relies on there
being an icon theme that provides it, which gnome-icon-theme
does.  Given that Yelp doesn't ship a "hicolor" version of
its application icon, would it be expected to ship versions
for a11y?  Or would HighContrast attempt to provide those
icons that are provided by gnome-icon-theme?

There's also the recent attempts at a unified icon naming
scheme.  This scheme provides for some generic application
icons, such as accessories-text-editor and help-browser.
I expect that Yelp will start using the help-browser icon
some time in the future, and I expect that khelpcenter will
also use it.  Since that's a generic icon, I think it would
be a very bad idea for Yelp to install it into hicolor, as
that would likely conflict with the file installed from any
other help browsers installed on the system.  So there will
be some version of the icon in hicolor-icon-theme, and maybe
another in gnome-icon-theme (or tango or whatever).  Given
that, I would expect that HighContrast would also provide
the help-browser icon.

Yelp does also ship some other images for marking types of
blocks.  For instance, there are the admonition graphics
(caution, important, note, tip, warning), and there are
some watermarks.  I made these themeable a few releases
back, 2.10 I think.  Obviously, since Yelp is shipping
its own images here, we would want Yelp to provide the
a11y versions.  But as a core Gnome module, I would just
turn to our Gnome artists for those anyway.  (You do not
want me drawing icons.)  So the end result is about the
same, except that the icons are in a different (and more
sensible) place in CVS.

On the whole, yes, I agree that applications should be
responsible for their own a11y icons, but only insofar
as they're responsible for their own hicolor icons.
Our a11y icon themes should provide the same shared
and generic icons that we expect to have in hicolor.
Trying to cover every random third-party app on our
end is a losing battle.

The question, then, is can we get the a11y themes to
be relevant to more than just Gnome, and how can we
emphasize to third-party developers how important it
is for them to provide such icons?  

A while back I put together a lgo page listing what
I think would make for a good set of high-level guides
for developers: http://live.gnome.org/DeveloperGuides

One of the guides listed there is the Accessibility
Guide for Developers.  I think having such a guide
would make it much easier for developers to know
what sorts of things they have to keep in mind when
trying to make accessible applications, including
providing a11y versions of any icons they provide.

I'm rambling.  I'll shut up now.

--
Shaun