Gnome Goal: High Contrast Application Icons

This post was made with another stylesheet and it might be messed up!

Gnome desktop environment cares about being accessible from everyone to use and contribute. As 2012 is the year of accessibility for Gnome, many exciting things are happening towards the bettering of the DE on this sector.

A new proposed goal concerns the logical completion of the high contrast theme with the creation and inclusion of high contrast icons for all Gnome applications and core utilities.

Right now, some icons exist while many don’t. This may confuse users with sight problems and generally make using Gnome very difficult for some people.

Every module that installs an application launcher is of course affected by this goal. There are many icons that are already done (that are not shown on the below screenshot), and quite a few to be done before Gnome 3.8

This isn’t official!

Please note that this is just a proposal for the time being and it is not yet sure that it will become an official Gnome goal. Check this Gnome Live webpage for more information and news about high contrast application icons.

http://twitter.com/varemenos Adonis K (Vαяēмēиøš)

Honestly, they should really consider remaking all the icons from start (either that or make Faenza or Faience icon pack as the official) cause the current ones are horrible.
- billtoulas
  
  High contrast icons are not about aesthetics you know, but yes the default Gnome icon set is not something to be proud of…
  - http://twitter.com/varemenos Adonis K (Vαяēмēиøš)
    
    Yes i do know, what i wanted to say is that they should consider redoing all the icons, not just the accessibility high contrast ones.
- alex285
  
  back to 70ies, it’s classic!
will

Is there a good reason why high contrast icons don’t use colour? I realise a lot of people with sight problems also have problems discerning colour, but surely a set of suitable colours with strong contrast could be picked and used to further differentiate icons? Either match colours with categories (blue for office, green for music, red for… etc.) or use them to differentiate between similar applications (Red for Firefox, Green for Chrome, etc.).
- alex285
  
  There are plenty of papers about high contrast standards. If user cannot specify the colors of his preference (which is the best solution) the next best default option is to make use of black and white. That doesn’t work for all people (and issues they have), but for the majority.
  
  http://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/visual-audio-contrast7.html
  http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/#visual-audio-contrast
  - Francesco Magazzu’
    
    for the more there are a lot of colored theme icons…
    
    This guy seems to have done already some good work (Treepata icon theme):
    http://xfce-look.org/content/show.php/Treepata+-+High+contrast?content=151928
Francesco Magazzu’

@Adonis you are right all the icons are not so nice … and it is not easy to find an icon set compleate.

About Hi Contrast I like them but the lark a lot of icons, I hope to see them soon ;)
http://twitter.com/finite9 Andrew

High contrast is aimed at people with vision problems, and in nix is still black on white it seems, whereas on Windows it’s on black background. I don’t have vision problems but do have dry eye issues and prefer black backgrounds. Is there an option in Gnome to have off-white text or coloured text on black backgrounds with off-white icons? Plus, is there a way to disable high contrast settings for web browsers ‘view frame’… I don’t know the technical term, but web browsers usually freak out and stuff disappears when in high contrast mode. I want it for the menu bar, but not for the page viewing area, as there are zero standards for this on the net.