1689512 - Unread and Star/Favorite icons difficult to distinguish (red/green colorblind)

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Theme, defect, P2)

Description

[David Foster]

Attachment: Thunderbird - The star and unread icons are now too similar in color - 1 & 2.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/88.0.4324.96 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

• Upgrade Thunderbird from 60.9.1 -> 68.12.1 -> 78.7.0.
• Open any mailbox in Thunderbird.
• Examine some messages are starred and some that are unread.

Actual results:

Unread icon for messages uses a green(?) color that is difficult to distinguish from the Starred/Favorite icon that is in a yellow color, especially for those who are red-green colorblind (such as myself). See screenshot for details.

Red-green colorblindness is the most common form of colorblindness and is estimated to affect about 8% of all men and 0.5% of all women. A bit less than 1 in 10 people. 1

In Thunderbird 60.9.1, the Unread icon was blue and the Star icon was yellow. Blue and yellow are significantly easier to distinguish, especially for those who are red-green colorblind.

Expected results:

Unread icon is in a color that is easy to distinguish from the yellow Starred/Favorite icon. I suggest going back to the blue version of the Unread icon that was used in Thunderbird 60.9.1. (Again, see screenshot for comparison between different Thunderbird versions.)

Comment 1

[David Foster]

FWIW, Thunderbird 68.12.1 also used the same blue-yellow icon pair as Thunderbird 60.9.1.

Comment 2

[Elizabeth Mitchell]

Attachment: Protonapia (no red) - new and unread icons

Comment 3

[Elizabeth Mitchell]

Attachment: Deuteranopia (no green) - new and unread indicators in Cards View

Comment 4

[Elizabeth Mitchell]

Attachment: Table View icons with no greeen (deuteranopia)

Comment 5

[Elizabeth Mitchell]

Attachment: Table View icons with no red (protanopia)

Comment 6

[Elizabeth Mitchell]

I am confirming this bug is pretty significant.

Multiple icons (starred, unread, new, and spam) look to be almost the same color with two types of colorblindness. Especially with unread and new, which both take up the same position in different locations, we need to make those colors more distinct from each other.

Comment 7

[Elizabeth Mitchell]

Per conversation within the design team, using blue for the unread indicator seems like a good way to distinguish between the unread and star icons as well as the unread and new icons. Per our discussion, we can evaluate if there is too much blue or not in the application with this change during the code review process.

Comment 8

[Elizabeth Mitchell]

Attachment: Bug 1689512: Update unread message indicator color. r=#thunderbird-front-end-reviewers

Comment 9

[Elizabeth Mitchell]

This bug had internal discussions about the best approach to resolve this. There has not been agreement yet on the best way to move forward with this. I will try to move this forward.