Highlight Color

I can't see the screen very well, at least not all the time. Sometimes I have to play little tricks to make things easier to read. One of these tricks is to highlight text so it has more contrast. This is particularly useful on the web. People have no concept of accessibility on the internet.

For a couple of months, I've been complaining about the highlight color on Gnome (Linux) at work. The versions of Linux I use do not come with very good color schemes or themes for high contrast. All but two of the themes that EL5 comes with have white text on a light blue background for a highlight color., The high contrast white theme has icons the size of dinner plates, slide bars that take up half the screen and is uuuuugly. The rest of the themes all seem to look the same. You can't use the inverted high contrast theme because it makes spreadsheets and other programs unreadable. They are getting better, but they are miles off right now.

I cannot find a Gnome program for generating themes by hand. All I wanted to do was change the highlight color to white text with a red background or yellow background and black text. Something that sticks out.

Enter Fedora 8. The Gnome theme chooser has a color option. You can just pick the color you want. You can even save the theme.I'm going to try to bring the Blue Curve theme that I modified to Red Curve to work and get it to work with my box there.  My luck, the files will not be compatible. That is a pessimistic point of view and I'm leaving that behind. I want to at least try.

I did run across a theme for Gnome that makes your desktop look just like a Mac. There is even a program that does that floating icon picker thing on the bottom of the screen. That might be interesting, but I hate that thing at the bottom of the screen on Macs. I'm sure people love it. It is the best thing since sliced bread. I used a Mac for a little bit many years ago with the beta version of OS-X.

Another accessibility thing that does not work in gnome/X is the magnifier. There are attempts to make it work, but they are counter productive. The default magnification thing just stops after a while. I could only get it to work on like half the screen at once. I really miss the magnifier in Windows. it was so simple and yet, now I know worked elegantly.