Certain battle mat colors can hide important information

[AdmiralJota]

From: http://buttonweavers.com/ui/forum.html#!threadId=517

Basically, if you set your battle mat background to certain colors, then important foreground details can become invisible. E.g., if you make it the same red color as the selected die border, the same blue color as a hyperlink, the same white as the forum star anchors, etc.

[AdmiralJota]

@irilyth and I were talking about this on IRC. Here are a few ideas we discussed:

• Make all the colors configurable. So you'd be able to select the die selection circle color for your mat, the foreground text color for your mat, the regular hyperlink color for your mat, the visited hyperlink color for your mat, the star anchor color for the forum, and then all of those things again for your opponent's mat and for each of the two neutral mats.

• Simplify the UI slightly and just make a few colors configurable -- not enough to give everyone the full range of options they might like, but enough that they can ensure nothing gets completely invisible. E.g., we make the hyperlinks for button and player names the same color as the regular text and give them one selector for "text that appears over any of these mats". And it's up to the user to pick one that works with both their own and their opponent's mat colors. (This would probably end up being 2-4 new preferences to save.)

• Try to use some clever logic to automatically pick colors for things that contrast with whatever colors the player has chosen for their mat. E.g., if they have a dark mat color, make sure the text displayed on it is white instead of black. If they have a reddish mat, make the selection circles cyan (or whatever).

• On the preferences page, try to automatically detect whether or not their selected colors are too similar to one of the standard ones that we're worried about and either disallow it or warn them if they choose one.

• Don't change how we actually display the game/forum/etc, at all right now. Instead, add a little preview panel to the preferences page. As they choose their colors, we show them a little live mockup of what they might look like in the game or in the forum.

• Don't change how we actually display the game/forum/etc, at all right now. Instead, just throw a line of text onto the preferences page along the lines of "Warning: if you choose a color very similar to black, white, bright red, or any color that your browser defaults to for text (such as for hyperlinks), then some parts of the site may not display properly for you."

Any opinions on these ideas, or other suggestions for addressing this?

[Matchstickmans]

Personally I am for "Make all colours configurable", followed by the "Simplify the UI slightly" then the "Clever Logic" options, in that order. Why? Not only because I want Red but also because you can't cover for every variation of colourblindness.

I do not like the disallow/warn options, some people will not see the warning no matter how big you make it, and I suspect if you outright ban certain colours you will have a new item later suggesting you add them back in!

[blackshadowshade]

I'm going to link #2147 here, since it looks like that discussion is going in a direction that won't be resolved simply. If someone works on implementing user colour preferences for this issue, it should be trivial to also add the colour of the "you can't win" message as a user-configurable colour.

[blackshadowshade]

I'm looking at this again, and I think there may be a seventh option:

• Pick standard colours that are not obvious choices, i.e., don't use principal RGB colours.

What do you think of this solution? It would be far easier to implement than most other choices, and may serve just as well.

[dwvanstone]

I think it's perfect the way it is. I don't think this use case is a compelling reason to make a change.