Re: application specific themeable icons

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

> >This is just not true. The way the automation works, is that it doesn't
> >use all of the detail of the original icon. It does add a little more
> >work to creating the icons, but not as much as actually creating an
> >entirely separate theme. What you do is use certain names for elements
> >in the icon, and the automation code ignores other elements and only
> >shows the appropriate paths, for the type of a11y icon needed.
> >
> >You really should look into what he's doing and how he's doing it,
> >before you just write it off completely.
> >  
> >
>   
>
> There's a difference between this approach of successive detail, and the 
> approach of purpose-built icons.  I stand by my previous statement.
>
> Bill
>   
Hi All;

Sorry to follow-up to myself but after such an admittedly strong 
statement I feel I should clarify.  I think that some sort of 
progressive detail scheme can improve icon accessibility; and in fact it 
could serve as a basis for delivering something effective for low vision 
users who need high contrast.  However, I think that in order to do a 
really good of this, the shapes used for HighContrast need to differ in 
more than just detail from those presented by default. 

I certainly wouldn't mind if the Gnome HighContrast icons were 
re-vectorized (I think they were originally created in Illustrator 
anyway - and SVG makes obvious sense for such icons) and then 
interleaved/merged with the 'stock' SVG icons.  In effect though, to do 
this most effectively, it would create icons-within-icons: the 
HighContrast not render any of the stock icon SVG elements at all, but 
only the included HighContrast alternates.  Of course it still means 
that each application icon needs, for best results, a hand-crafted 
HighContrast shape.  What I am saying is that there's no "automation" 
that can create good HighContrast/low-vision shapes from 
already-existing default shapes, even if those shapes already include 
some level-of-detail styling.

Bill