Improvements to high contrast mode support

[Tim Guan-tin Chien]

Great write-up and nice work!
I wonder what more we could do than "...keep this in mind when writing and
reviewing patches"? Can we scan for hardcoded colors in tests? Do a
screenshot comparison?

On Thu, Oct 13, 2016 at 4:05 AM, Mike de Boer <mdeboer at mozilla.com> wrote:

> \o/ Nice work, Dão! I really like the before/ after screenshots, they
> really show the improvements made for the share of users that are,
> unfortunately, visually impaired.
>
> I’ll be keeping this in mind and will probably reach out to you soon for
> your advise in making sure the findbar highlighter supports high contrast
> modes properly too ;-)
>
> Cheers,
>
> Mike.
>
> On 12 Oct 2016, at 14:02, Dão Gottwald <dgottwald at mozilla.com> wrote:
>
> Over the last quarter, I've been focused on making Firefox properly
> support high contrast mode again. The tracking bug for this is <
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1016556>.
>
> In case you didn't know, high contrast mode is a collection of Windows
> themes tailored for users with not so good eyesight:
> https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13862/windows-use-h
> igh-contrast-mode
>
> There are four high contrast themes available, three of which have black
> as their base color and one black-on-white variant:
> http://thewindowsclub.thewindowsclubco.netdna-cdn.com/wp-con
> tent/uploads/2015/01/high-contrast-themes-windows.jpg
>
> High contrast mode considered an important accessibility feature. Formally
> we have always supported this, but in reality our support has been far from
> perfect and in many cases gotten worse over the years.
>
> Here are a few screenshots to illustrate what kinds of bugs we've fixed:
>
> Menu bar, search bar and about:home (before): http://imgur.com/vMXgZMm
> Menu bar, search bar and about:home (after): http://imgur.com/a4Volo5
> Menu panel and customize mode (before): http://imgur.com/iBXWbeA
> Menu panel and customize mode (after): http://imgur.com/n881M4v
>
> As you can see, issues range from text being completely illegible and
> icons disappearing, over icons and text lacking contrast, to some parts of
> the UI not adjusting at all to high contrast themes.
>
> Support still isn't perfect but a lot better than it used to be. Going
> forward we as a team will need to remind ourselves that high contrast mode
> is a thing and that we're committed to supporting it. Please keep this in
> mind when writing and reviewing patches. Please test your features in high
> contrast mode.
>
> You might want to take a look at the fixed bugs to get a sense of what's
> needed to support high contrast mode. It often comes down to picking
> platform colors instead of hardcoding color values, or carefully picking
> color values that don't assume that everyone is using the same default OS
> theme. If you're unsure what's needed to make your feature properly support
> high contrast mode, feel free to ask me for feedback.
>
> Regards,
> Dao
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