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Talk:WMDE Technical Wishes/Improved Color Scheme of Syntax Highlighting

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Latest comment: 3 years ago by Johanna Strodt (WMDE) in topic Color blindness

Color blindness

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This project sounds great, I've experienced some of these problems with the current colors. Thank you for working on this!

I'm wondering if color blindness might be considered, too?

AFAIK, the best tool for simulating color blind vision on a webpage is Toptal - E.g. here's this project page shown as a deuteranomalous (the most common form) person might see it. (n.b. our mobile skin fits better in their page-layout restrictions)

There are a few other relevant links within w:en:MOS:COLOR that might help, including some suggested colors palettes in https://personal.sron.nl/~pault/#sec:qualitative

Unfortunately, I don't have enough understanding of the topic to suggest specific ways that you could tweak the existing proposal's suggested palette-changes. And I do realize that it is impossible to make a single scheme with nine+ distinct text colors that works well for everyone.

Hope that helps! Quiddity (talk) 20:31, 17 December 2020 (UTC)Reply

@Quiddity: I want to apologize for this exceptionally late reply! Thanks a lot for your input, which I passed on to the rest of the team. We did actually consider color blindness, and we would very much like to provide a scheme for color-blind users. But unfortunately, we cannot say with certainty if we will get around to developing it. -- Many greetings, Johanna Strodt (WMDE) (talk) 13:42, 16 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
Understood. I have been trying to learn bits about the overall topic for many years, and there is very little clear documentation for what should be done, in order to guide web-developers and designers, so I grok the complexity. I've even tried asking in a few off-wiki color-blindness communities, but they didn't have any better suggestions than the few resources we already knew about.
I tentatively suggest that it might be worth experimenting with that last "sron.nl" link I put above, to make an alternative/optional user.css color scheme that could potentially be available for those who want it (or even just to demonstrate the complexity of it all!).
Hmm, and it seems that Toptal.com link isn't working at the moment (hopefully temporary). But Coblis still works for local-file testing.
p.s. For myself, I do deeply appreciate the darker blue for internal links! It's so much more legible. :) Thanks again. Quiddity (talk) 01:07, 17 March 2021 (UTC)Reply
@Quiddity: Thanks again for your feedback! We have developed and tested a design for colorblindness already, but we're not sure if we have time to implement it. But our plan is to share this scheme either way. BTW, our UX expert looked into the links you provided and told me that she is using very similar tools for testing how the colors look to users of different types of colorblindness. Actually, the final scheme is based on one of the papers you mention. -- Best, Johanna Strodt (WMDE) (talk) 12:54, 30 March 2021 (UTC)Reply