Color Contrast

Greetings all:

As I age, I find it more and more difficult to navigate within Logos 8. This is especially true if the ambient light is not optimal.

The greatest difficulty I have is with the lines which outline the various windows open in Logos. The single greatest difficulty is the very narrow and very difficult to see slide bar on the right side of every window. Not only is the slide bar way too narrow the contrast in color with the active or inactive windows is barely noticeable in most light environments in which I find myself. And then the location slide is barely distinguishable from the slide range. (What is odd to me is that the slide on this forum window is about 50% wider than the slide on an open Logos 8 window with the text being the same size.)

I have played with each color combination Logos gives. I have played with Widows defaults and have not really found any combination that rectifies the problem for me.

My recommendation for a fix is to make the slide both wider and a color that is a greater contrast. What is nuisance now gone from a to a difficulty. At this rate, it will soon become a serious handicap for my using the software.

What suggestions might you have for solving this issue? I am certainly open to suggestions on the windows default color setting, though in my ideal world, Logos would give me control within the program itself for color contrasts as well as the width of the slider.

Chuck

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Comments

Reuben Helmuth

Chuck, are you referring to the scroll bar? If so, there really should be very little need to use it unless you have a mouse without a scroll wheel...

Am I misunderstanding you?

Robert M. Warren

Hi Chuck:

the very narrow and very difficult to see slide bar on the right side of every window.

I know the name of that tune.

The scroll slider gets a little darker once you mouse-over it, but...that means you've found it, and our problem is finding it. Scroll wheels are great, and that's what I mainly use, but fine-tuning the lines-per-scroll across applications sometimes produces uneven results.

I use Windows 7 & 10, and Negative Screen (see Wiki) really helps me on bad eye days or when my eyes are tired, but it doesn't really help on this issue. Windows 7 has three high contrast themes, but they don't help this issue, and Logos is totally non-functional under those, anyway, as most resource text is invisible. Besides, if I wanted to use DOS 2.01, I would have kept my XT (/ File, Retrieve!). What might help is if there were some Logos option or extension similar to Chrome's High Contrast extension. It really helps me see the feeble bluish/grayscale text that is so inexplicably popular on web sites. It rather obscures pictures, but I don't see irregular objects very well anyway.

The trends in web/UI design over the last decade or so are obviously popular, but I think they've left some of us behind.

Anthony Dowden

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1042198#Comment_1042198

As we get older our eyesight deteriorates - not much you can do about that! BUT, I’m sure if some of the software designers found themselves in the unfortunate position of having the beginnings of a cataract - they would soon do something about it.

Would it not be quite easy to have an option to run the programme in a mode where all the text is black? in the areas where a highlight is necessary there could be a user choice of colour and shading.

I would like to hear from any programmers as to the difficulties of executing something like this.

I write this as somebody who had cataracts but could not get it dealt with until they got quite bad. I would also hasten to add that Logos is one of the best programs for clarity that I have used in recent years.

Tony.

Chuck Forsythe

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1042250#Comment_1042250

Thank you all for your comments.

Reuben, I do use my mouse's scrolling wheel often. However there are times when I cannot use the mouse.

I know this is an issue because I am developing cataracts. I am not sure the persons responsible for the interface of most software are fully aware of the difficulty that early stages of cataracts create, not to mention the complications of color-blindness. (Although, I am not color blind, 8% of men are color blind.) To create something that is readable for those with color-blindness requires using colors with very sharp contrasts. Too bad some of those kinds of design solutions can not be incorporated into software interface design. I really don't care to be trendy or modern, I prefer useability. Of course, I understand this is my preference.

I note both Word and WordPerfect have wide sliders with a very good contrast of colors, even when their windows are reduced to the size of a typical Logos window.

Alas, it appears there is no solution for my problem

Chuck