515150 - Additional option to choose unfocused/unselected/inactive flag colour/color

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, enhancement)

Description

[Justin Savidge]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2 (.NET CLR 4.0.20506)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.1) Gecko/20090715 Thunderbird/3.0b3

The ability to tag email within Thunderbird is great, however it would be better to be able to define an "inactive" colour/color for any tags you create so that they stand out against other untagged email, thus drawing more attention to the fact that they are tagged.

Often if I'm flicking back and forth between other applications and Thunderbird, I tend not to notice that email that is unselected but tagged is coloured differently. This would also be of benefit to colour/color blind users especially if the use of patterns could also be allowed to be used.

For example (illustrated in a Photoshop concept linked in the URL field):

I have tagged four email messages, "Important message" as Important, "RE: Hi" as Personal (which is actually selected, and which the selected (or default colour/color is readily visible) "Minutes from Today's meeting" and "Lunch at 1300hrs" as Work and Personal respectively. "Request for IronPython assistance" is untagged.

As far as I'm aware, there is no extension available to change this behaviour. I've quickly created a dialog of what the "New Tag" dialog would look like with the changes requested: http://i299.photobucket.com/albums/mm293/deltafalcon2008/thunderbirdtag.jpg

Echo of example of feature requested in URL field: http://i299.photobucket.com/albums/mm293/deltafalcon2008/thunderbirdcolourscopy.jpg

Reproducible: Didn't try

Steps to Reproduce:
Not reproducable, feature request.


Expected Results:  
When an email message in the main window that is tagged is not actively selected, the row background colour/color should fall back to the "Inactive colour" as discussed above, and if selected, the primary colour/color be used.

The benefits of implementing this change allows the distinguishability between tagged and untagged email messages to be increased if the user so desires to create or modify tags to their liking.

It also allows vision-impaired users to be able to distinguish tagged messages more at a glance as well as non vision impared users.

This would be an optional feature, if the user so desires so impact on annoying users would be minimal.

Comment 1

[Justin Savidge]

Attachment: What the enhancement would display if used

Comment 2

[Justin Savidge]

Attachment: What the dialog could look like to illustrate the feature request