Re: RFC: Adding syntax highlighting to the official documentation

[John Wheeler]

Jean,

My concern for color blindness stemmed from having worked on government 
manuals probably two decades ago.  We were taught that you should 
include nothing that relied solely on color to make sense of the text.  
If you are working to modern web accessibility guidelines you are 
certainly way ahead of what I can add to the subject.  I am sorry I did 
not pick up on that if you mentioned it before.

The other concern is more a personal thing with me.  When I say printed 
text, I was referring to pdf output. I will often print a pdf file so I 
can better read it from paper.  When you mentioned adding color to pdf 
files, you caught my attention.  I have seen too many books that I 
personally have a very hard time using because either someone has 
indiscriminately highlighted passages they thought important or the book 
designer decided to use color in some way to "guide" the reader. What 
other people must see as artful use of color I find so distracting that 
I struggle to follow the text.

I am showing my age here, but I have a daughter that tells me if I had 
been born this century, I would have been tested for autistic issues.  
Though I have never been diagnosed, I suspect she would say my 
sensitivity to color stems from that source.

I hope this helps you understand my request that some way of printing 
black and white be preserved.

Thank you,

John


On 12/18/21 11:38 AM, Jean Abou Samra wrote:
> Hi John,
>
> Le 18/12/2021 à 17:31, wheelerwjx9@runbox.com a écrit :
> > When employing color in printed text, or print requivalent text, 
> > please be considerated of your readers who are color blind or have 
> > attention problems related to color.
> >
> > For the former you need to provide a way to completely remove color 
> > from the material without making it un-readable.  For example, in the 
> > colorized code shared earlier, and depending on visual imparment, 
> > words that are in color could be completely missing for some readers.
> >
> > For, the later group, a way to opt out of colorization should be 
> > considered a requirement. I have seen text books that I personaly 
> > cannot read because some who owned the book before had taken a 
> > hilighter to.
>
>
> I am not sure I understand the issues at
> hand well. I thought it would suffice to
> design the color scheme with high enough
> contrast so that the code would stay readable
> for people with impaired vision. I have
> been using the WCAG contrast indicator for
> that. It's true that the first proposed
> style had bad contrast (I didn't realize
> the problem at that time), but the new one
> has a minimum of 6.1 which I thought would
> be enough above the AA level of 4.5. Do
> you think it is necessary to provide a way
> to opt out of syntax highlighting nevertheless?
> By printed text, do you mean the PDF output,
> or also HTML output? (I thought there would
> be tools to remove color when browsing?)
> Could you say more about 'attention problems
> related to colors'? I don't know much about
> this topic, but I am curious to learn more.
>
> Thanks,
> Jean