293287 - highlighting selected text reverses background color but not font color

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Larry Siden]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050308 Firefox/1.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050308 Firefox/1.0.1

When the user selects text either in page or in form input box, background color
is reversed, but not foreground text color, making highlighted section
impossible to read.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Select text in either form input box or anywhere on page.
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
Selected text is unreadable.

Expected Results:  
Reverse foreground color in addition to background color.

Comment 1

[Ben Fowler]

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050507
Firefox/1.0+

My apologies, but I have never seen anything like this on a web page. Do you
have a URL that shows the problem?

Comment 2

[Larry Siden]

It does not matter what the URL is.  The URL can be anything, even a local file.
  I will attach a screenshot that should demonstrate.  I selected the words in
your last message "Do you have a URL"... 

Comment 3

[Larry Siden]

Attachment: demonstrates how background color, but not text color, is reversed for selected text, essentially blacking it out.

Comment 4

[Ben Fowler]

O.K. Your original report spoke of background colour being reversed, but not
foreground.

Since the backgound colour is white, I was expecting your screen shot to
show the reversed part as black. I was expecting to see the highlight as 
black on black (obviously wrong).

In fact your screen shot shows the highlight effect's being produced by
changing the background to light blue.

Surely this is correct! Am I misunderstanding your screen shot?

Comment 5

[Larry Siden]

(In reply to comment #4)
Forgive me, I cannot distinguish dark colors very well.  You are right.  After
examining in Gimp, the bg color is 0x456b7f, which is definitely not black, but
not light blue either (at least to my eyes).  Significantly for me, the black
text is nearly indistinguishable against this background unless I zoom in to
make it very large.  I was wondering if the selection highlight colors might be
configurable, but did not find this anywhere in Firefox Preferences.  

I also checked if this might be determined by some setting in my window manager
as it might be for other applications.  I ran gedit, wrote then selected some
text.  The background color of the selected text is the same as for FF (0x456b77
as above), but the text color changes to white, maintaining its visibility
against this dark background.  Therefore, I concluded that Firefox, not the
window manager, controls how selected text is highlighted in any of its windows.
 (For the record, I currently use gnome-desktop 1.8.1.  I am soon to upgrade to
1.8.3.  I am not sure if this is the name of my window manager.)

Comment 6

[Larry Siden]

I just updated to gnome-desktop 2.8.3, and voila', Firefox now displays selected
text correctly, so that the font color is also reversed.  I don't know whether
the new version corrected something, or the update-script just overwrote some
configuration file that had gotten misconfigured somehow.  I'll leave it to you
whether you want me to pursue this further to find out if there is some problem
with gnome-desktop 2.8.1, or just mark it as INVALID and move on.

Comment 7

[Ben Fowler]

Firefox should be fully usable by people with visual impairment. This covers
a multitude of points which most of us are blessed to appreciate very little 
about.

You might want to check the 'Disability Access' component to see whether there
is anything that is relevant, or you that could contribute to.

FWIW, on my platform the colour is a light blue in the sense that all dark 
blue elements are legible against it, but it could be lighter. Also, it 
doesn't seem to follow the system settings, even when asked to. I could not 
find a configuration for this. At least one of those points is a bug and 
there should be a Report for it.

(It is possible that the Preferences setting for System colors refers to
the colors used for linkls and link states only).

Your experiences with Gnome do suggest that in your browsing configuration, 
this accessiblity point can be pushed onto their plate, but I suspect that 
there are a lot of issues that can't be, and at the very least, there should 
be adequate documentation.

I suspect that Firefox on most platforms defaults to Light Blue for 
highlighting, and that it could reasonably be lighter if it is not possible to
make it configurable. On my platform, the colour is "#BFD8FA", which is
lighter than yours, and comparable to the 'out of the box' colour on my 
platform, which is "#BFD6FF".

Camino uses the System highlight. Personally, I think that all applications 
should use System colours, highlight and accessibility features, that is why 
the system settings are there!

Comment 8

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 9

[Ben Fowler]

Actually, I have seen the identical behaviour to the original report on
Gentoo/Gnome. 

It may have been fixed in later versions of Gnome, but this was a True
Bill at the time, and possibly something to watch out for in the future.

Comment 10

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

"I haven't noticed it for a long time so I think that the problem has
been resolved long ago.  You can put this one to bed." Larry, 9/7/06
->WFM