[gentoo-user] tuning desktop appearance for legibility

[John Blinka]

Hi, Everyone,

As I have gotten older, reading what’s on my computer screen has become
more challenging.  I’ve adjusted with a big, high resolution monitor,
bigger fonts, better fonts, and ophthalmologists.  All helpful steps.

Recently, I’ve been playing with different desktop appearance options.  I
run xfce, and choose these appearance options in Settings->Appearance.  I
think I’ve explored everything relevant in /usr/portage/x11-themes but not
sure because it’s not clear to me what the various packages do.

I’ve tried a number of themes and icon packages.  All of them have
significant problems.  In some combos, I lose functionality.  (E.g.,  the
little up-down arrows at the top and bottom of scrollbars that allow you to
step up and down disappear on many combinations.)

The BlackMATE theme and Adwaita icon set are the most useful I’ve found.
But not without problems.

Today I was using Gnucash, and the BlackMATE/Adwaita combination presented
me with dark gray backgrounds on which to type black numbers.  Not the
clearest color combination.

Another example:   black window scroll bars on dark gray backgrounds.
Challenging to see.

There are other issues, such as websites that like to present medium gray
text on light gray backgrounds (sorry, can’t provide a specific example
right now).  Firefox, in Preferences->Fonts and Colors->Colors, has some
limited ability to override website color schemes with other colors, but
that hasn’t worked well for me in general, because it often gives many
websites a bizarre appearance.

I’m guessing this group has a number of folks who’ve encountered similar
problems.  I have several questions for you.

1) How  do you cope with this problem?

2) Is there an xfce theme and icon package you recommend?  Or maybe
something other than xfce?  I like xfce, and have never been attracted to
integrated desktops like kde and gnome, but if they’ve got a credible
solution, I’m willing to try.

3) Are there lower level ways of tweaking my current desktop?  For example,
changing colors in the 2 examples I gave above from black on dark gray to
black on white?  Could that be done with a little judicious editing of
color settings somewhere, or adjusting colors on an icon?  I don’t know how
desktop appearances are programmed, so I don’t know where on the spectrum
of trivial->apocalyptic this lies.

Thanks for your suggestions!

John Blinka