Text in dark theme has unreadable low-contrast.

[tomFlowee]

Description

I encoutered these screens yesterday and after consulting on telegram we agreed this is an issue that should be fixed by the OSMAnd devs.

The basic issue is that the minor texts have a color chosen that is so close to the background color that it is extremely hard to read. ESPECIALLY at night.

(red added manually to indicate which text we're talking about).

Here it is all the smaller text between the titles that is equally hard to make out.

Additionally, I have an AMOLED display, which makes the background actually very bright to me. Many apps have given the opportunity for such displays to pick a 'mightnight' theme next to the old 'dark' theme. With practically black background since on those displays that really is actually black. And that helps the contrast enormously, as you can imagine.

It would be nice if the colors can be fixed in the main theme, it would be even better if we can see a midnight theme for those people that have the 'modern' screens.

Steps to reproduce

Reproducing is to find a old guy with not perfect eyes and set the phone to dark mode. :-)

Actual result

Half the text is not readable at normal, standard settings.

Expected result

Legible text. That is what I expect. To be able to read it easily without straining my eyes.

Your Environment (required)

OsmAnd Version: (fdroid) 4.8.6 (480601)
Android/iOS version: /e/OS 2.2. Android 13.
Device model: Murena Two
Crash-Logs: no

[tomFlowee]

Here is another example:

The screenshot has tiny text with barely legible color saying "Within 150 m". While in town yesterday we ended up walking to the wrong stop based on the belief that those lines actually went there. I talked about my opening this bugreport and a couple of minutes later got a "OMG, that was the problem here too!" from the wife. See, we thought it must be a map bug at the time. But it was due to the UX issue where we thought the bus we needed actually stopped at that location. The UX issue being that a very important label had unreadable colors.

[dmpr0]

Hello! Thank you for the feedback. Did you try High Contrast Text mode in you Android settings?

[tomFlowee]

Hello! Thank you for the feedback.

sir, this is a bugreport. Stuff that doesn't work. "Feedback" is a bit of a strange term to use. Your tag "nice to have" is likewise ignoring that actual real people can not read the text on the screen of your app in the real world.

Being able to have legible text is something that I'd argue is several steps above "nice to have".

Did you try High Contrast Text mode in you Android settings?

Two comments;

1. this makes all the other apps that have already legible text look ugly. Pure white text on pure black background is too much.
2. in OSMAnd all text does get fully white, but not exactly as you'd expect. The (small extra) text itself gets fully black and then there is a white thin outline around the text. Which makes the text actually LESS readable.

[tomFlowee]

For reference, here is the default settings app, notice the colors being completely different than OSMAnd screenshots above.

This has contrast without the need of making the text pure white.

[tomFlowee]

I ran the actually used colors through the color contrast checker, it now has a score of 3. Which is terrible for fonts below 18pt. Scientifically speaking.

[sonora]

Please allow me to chime in here by reminding us that OsmAnd naturally needs to target outdoor use out-of-the-box. It must be usable in difficult lighting conditions like bright sunshine (I regularly use it in deserts).

There seems no acceptable excuse for not having acted to date on my analysis and report already in 2020? Is there any tangible reason why we are so hesitant, stubborn or ignorant about this, as it clearly affects some of OsmAnd's primary use cases?

[sonora]

PS: Direct comparison of my Android's system color pattern in the standard menu vs. OsmAnd. Any reason why OsmAnd is worse both for the primary and secondary text?

[Velomeloman]

Please don't force an irreversible change of text color

[XandrexOSM]

Did you try High Contrast Text mode in you Android settings?

hi @dmpr0 ,

In AOSP there is only one "dark mode" settings. Depending on the brand of the smartphone or of the AOSP-based OS, options for several "dark modes" may or may not be available. on my side, I use an OPPO Realme phone and indeed, I have two dark modes, with various other constrast settings available.

---

Some FLOSS apps provide two "dark modes" independently from the OS choices, please find below an example with the app Newpipe:

[sonora]

This https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd/commit/7276f65513696ed207ebd42be0375a8c2ca0cb74 is cool, @dmpr0 , thanks!!

Any chance we expand this also to the _text_colortertiaries (and the button colors), the "bus stop" screenshot a little further up this isssue would specifically benefit from that correction, I think?

[sonora]

@vshcherb No improvement also to the tertiary text color? On some dialogs and graphs it has a rather significant role...

[vshcherb]

Open question to @dmpr0

[dmpr0]

ToDo

Context menu

• [ ] Use text_color_secondary_light/dark
• • [ ] for main menu actions (Add, Marker, Share, Actions).
• • [ ] For second line text (below POI name)