Bugzilla – Bug 14003
Need an accessible skin for 7.4 controller.
Last modified: 2012-03-09 07:27:22 UTC
I have pretty good vision for a 67 year old, and none of the 7.4 skins is at all easy to use. I have brightness full on. I've tried all the skins - encore is best, but not nearly good enough. I urge you to have one very clean skin, with good contrast from top to bottom, good contrast of text and background, and no tiny fonts. Specific examples. It's almost impossible for me to read the progress bar. The times to left and right are in a tiny font. Make the art smaller if necessary - it's just eye candy while the times matter. The second line of the description on now playing - artist and album - are also too small and dim for my old eyes. Because the background gets darker towards the bottom of the screen, it's very hard to see which line is selected at the bottom in menus and other lists. Quartet doesn't have this problem, but make now playing much worse, and is a hard color to live with. firmware 7.4.0 r7538 (also a struggle to read the white against teal small font).
Technically this is a duplicate of bug#13278, but I want to leave this open because I think the comments here are really well thought out and should be read. I'm just going to link this bug to that one. I think there are some really superb improvements on the 7.4 UI redesign (e.g., 6 items per page and a larger font is an improvement in readability, IMO), but controller suffers in certain ways pretty badly for viewability. That will need to be addressed soon. Marking as 7.4/P3, same as 13278
Just want to add a comment on the progress bar, from an under 40 year old-- If your playing track is 10 minutes or longer, then the time indicators go to 4 digits and shrink to a size that just looks like a blob. Totally unreadable. Maybe not an issue for most music, but think about podcasts. There is room there to make the text larger, even the bar could be shorter to make more room for text. I agree most of the Controller UI changes are for the better, but that progress bar and Artist - Album line are a problem. This applies to the Radio skin as well as the Controller. Touch to a lesser degree--just for the progress time on long tracks.
I can improve the situation by using paint to make a monochrome wallpaper. rgb 54:129:131 works well for me. font size is still an issue, but at least I can see my selections, and the now playing screen is easier to read.
CC'ing Weldon.
(In reply to comment #3) > I can improve the situation by using paint to make a monochrome wallpaper. > > rgb 54:129:131 works well for me. > > font size is still an issue, but at least I can see my selections, and the now > playing screen is easier to read. Noah, this might be an issue where we have to provide a skin that might be gnarly-looking or low-fidelity but that is at least accessible to users. If the 7.3 version was truly easier to read for users, then there must be a way to provide a more accessible skin.
Matt- Is the proposal to create a uniform, solid color wallpaper to include in the skin? If so, would it replace an existing one? The original post states mostly problems with the Now Playing template, no? FWIW we already include solid Black wallpaper...
Have you looked at it? (solid black) One issue you need to look at is the difference between the selected and not selected entry. One problem with all the wallpapers is that they are black at the bottom, and you can't tell which entry is selected. That's why I made a neutral, intermediate darkness wallpaper which is the same from top to bottom.
One minor tweak that would _really_ help usability IMHO would be to use mix fonts for selection and non selected menu items. This would help all IR skins. Please see attached and feel free to call to discuss positives/neg. This was something that was proposed for the original Controller skin, however, the fonts were significantly smaller then. Lowering the weight to Medium for the non-selected could be a win/win due to the fact the selection bar is fixed and color has been ruled out for numerous reasons... The other approach would be to create an off black (gray) wallpaper in place of the "Black" wallpaper to pump up the contrast and give users a solid/continuous background for navigation. Again from off angles and far dist. this is not a silver bullet.
Created attachment 6351 [details] Ref screen for mixed fonts FS Medium 18px = non selected item FS Bold 21px = selected item
Created attachment 6352 [details] monochrome wallpaper for controller IMHO, a proper monochrome wallpaper makes seeing the selected line a non-issue. I've attached the one I like.
7.4.x milestone is in the past