2017-11-20 13:14:42

Folks, I am currently writing an accessible diary, however this will also be valuable to me for all my future games.  I would like to know peoples preferences for 4 things: text colours, background colours and also colours for the highlight and highlighted text, for example in menus.  It would be easy to set the text as white and background as black and reverse those for the highlight, I.e. black text on white, but such a highlight may not suit everyone.  Cheers.

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2017-11-20 13:40:21

Moderation!

As this is games related, even though it's about preferences I'll move it to general game discussion since the offtopic room is for anything not! about games.

For myself, black background is usually best. I cannot read text but I can often see highlighting etc and I appreciate colours.
The optimum colour combination for me, and for a lot of people with reduced vision who can still see colour is yellow on black, though often I prefer having different colours just to have something to look at, this was one thing I rather liked in Rockey space invaders, the fact that the invaders etc were different colours, it reminded me strongly of games on Atari and on eighties computers like the zx spectrum or  Amigar.

hth.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2017-11-20 15:40:04

For that, I think people with different visual conditions probably have their own preferred setup, so maybe it would be prudent to let them set that type of thing up in a menu if you want to accommodate a variety of eye problems

For me, a black background with either yellow or blue text works well, though I don't even really use my vision much any more to read print. But CCTV's must have those weird combinations because people actually use them, so yeah.

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2017-11-20 15:49:48

My current default is yellow on black background, with the highlight being a simple reverse, black text on yellow.  I can give total freedom to choose colours, but things soon get cluttered.  For example if I give light and dark of the 3 primary colours red, green and blue, together with their colour opposites, cyan, magenta and yellow, I already have 14 choices for text and 14 choices for backgrounds.  Would this be too many?

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2017-11-21 12:25:33

OK currently I have 2 ways to go.  I have 20 colours currently in menu choices, black, white, light, dark and medium versions of the 3 primary colours red green and blue, together with light, dark and medium versions of their opposites, yellow, cyan and magenta.
The big question:
Should I put all 20 as choices for text colour and all 20 for background colour choices?
Or can I assume the light ones for text and the darker ones for background?  this second option would be less clutter in the menus, but would rule out some choices such as dark blue on a pale yellow background.
All input welcome.

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2017-11-21 17:33:08

I'd say myself light text and dark background is fine, so long as there is a black text on white for people who  want the standard option.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2017-11-27 14:54:15

Wondered why this topic had so little interest.  My guess however is that folks sort out their own high contrast solutions.  Perhaps the same goes for text sizes.  Anyways I have had several preferences, enough to realise that there is a very wide range of needs out there.  Ranging from yellow to green to blue on black to white on grey and even black on sea green. 
I have therefore opted for around 20 options for both text and background and to save such settings so folks only have to set it up once.  Toning down the dazzle seems to be almost universal, even with my sighted buddies.  If any dev wants a list of my colours I am happy to post them in the devs forum.  The accessible diary will be up on my website tomorrow.  Dark, sadly the program won't let you choose your favourites, black on black.

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2017-11-27 18:53:31

I would just use the Windows colors people have chosen. People that have enough sight left for it to matter, just as I did as my vision started deteriorating would set up Windows to use what works best for them. And now that my vision is mostly gone, it doesn't really matter how Windows is set up because I can no longer see enough of the screen for it to be of any use, so I just set the Windows 7 Basic theme for performance, and leave the colors alone.

2017-11-29 18:50:12

Orko, I'm using python to create a GUI and I'm putting an Ariel font on the screen.  It looks like text but it is a different animal to the text inside a window such as Microsoft word, or a text field on your browser.  The colours on the GUI are not chosen by the operating system, the colours are either set by me or the user.  Also, as Dark mentioned, such preferences are also very informative to developers choosing colours for game objects.  For example, in my spacey vaders game there were vividly coloured alien spacecraft but also some black ones to balance the game a little back towards the audio gamer.  I'm hoping I'm on the right track and hoping it's useful for some folks, but I'm in the same camp as you, I can't see what's on the screen either.

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