472759 - highlighting of labeled items is illegible

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 469300

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Matthew Woehlke]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2008121622 Fedora/3.0.5-1.fc10 Firefox/3.0.5
Build Identifier: version 2.0.0.19 (20090105)

(Note: I use a dark-on-light color scheme, which may matter...)

When an item has a label, the label color is used as the foreground color when painting the subject in the mail/news list. This is well and good, and as it should work. However, when that item is /selected/, the label color is used as the BACKGROUND color, and the normal foreground color is used for the foreground.

This is bad for two reasons. First, it is an accessibility violation (foreground colors must never be used as background colors; some users - e.g. those that cannot read dark-on-light - cannot read text when this is done, regardless of relative contrast). Second, since both the text color and label color are likely to have high contrast relative to the background color, which is to say LOW contrast relative to each other... the likely result is illegible text.

My guess is that the foreground color is actually from the selection color set (my view and selection normal text colors are sufficiently similar I can't say for certain which is being used), and that this behavior proceeds from the wrong and broken assumption that the selection is light-on-dark while the view is dark-on-light (in which case this behavior would be tolerable, if still wrong).

The correct solution is to produce a modified selection background color that is similar to the label color but has sufficient contrast w.r.t. the foreground color (i.e. with similar luma to the normal background color). (KDE has this function as KColorUtils::tint.)

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Matthew, do you read this as a dupe of bug 341770?

Comment 2

[Matthew Woehlke]

No. As I read that, it's dealing with normal items, not selection. The problem here is that the colors used by default for selected items with a label are broken. (And this should be fix-able without introducing new customization abilities.)