7 Jun
2022
7 Jun
'22
2:06 a.m.
On Sun, Jun 05, 2022 at 09:49:13PM +0100, Will Godfrey wrote:
As a {cough} sprightly 73 year old I'm starting to
have sight difficulties -
especially dark colours and night vision. With the current trend of dark GUI
shades this presents me with a problem when using new software. Some, but not
all of these programs do provide alternatives. However they default to dark, and
I have a hard time finding how to change this, or indeed, even seeing which
options are available.
Being a few but not so much years younger I do understand the problems you
may have. But I don't think the essence of this can be simplified to 'light'
vs 'dark' themes. There are good reasons for having dark themes - working in
a dark environment like a concert being the most evident one.
Even a dark theme can be perfectly readable if designed well. This may involve
more than just changing the colors of a light one. For example, you'll probably
need 'bolder' fonts as well. And the background should never be completely black
but provide an amount of brightness that allows your eyes to adjust to it. It
is the inability of your vision to adjust that makes many dark themes hard to
use.
Simple fact is that all popular GUI toolsets are targeted to developing 'office'
or 'social' type of applications and completely fail to address the needs for
anything outside that limited scope. There is much more to this than just the
choice of colors.
I've been involved in creating displays used in aircraft cockpits and similar
technical environments. Almost all of the 'standard' GUI design guidelines
(as advocated by 'computer science' academics) have been shown to be either
irrelevant or just plain wrong for such applications. That probably includes
graphical interfaces for pro-audio systems.
Ciao,
--
FA