RE: facemenu-unlisted-faces

[Drew Adams]

    > more as a rudimentary palette than a list of names. A
    > simple, quick menu for bold, italic, underline, and a few simple
    > foreground colors would be useful.

    One problem with mere swatches is that a non-trivial part of the male
    population (typical programmer's sex) is color-blind in some respect.

Yes, about 8% of men and 0.5% of women are in some way "color challenged".

    If those swatches are used for more than coloring the person's
    personal screen (namely if colors may persist), then picking colors
    judiciously necessitates seeing their names for such people.

We're talking about GUI shortcuts here - tool-bar and short-menu access.

Daltonians can cope with that as they do for other UIs that employ color. We
can add tooltips to the swatches. That will serve those with screen readers
too (I don't know if the blind bother creating and editing text with color,
but they might at least want to use bold etc. for emphasis.)

Using the main suggestion I made, someone could apply a face by name (plus
appearance) in the exhaustive face list, and its name (and appearance) would
then be added to the quick-access menu for subsequent use.

There are lots of things in WYSIWYG applications that are not especially
friendly to the blind, color-blind, and people with other accessibility
issues. For accessibility, the important thing is to not rely on things like
color as the *only* way to differentiate something. Accessibility
guidelines, for instance, don't tell you not to use color - they tell you
not to use only color to communicate information. If you provide users
alternative ways to access the same information, there should be no problem.

Let's not throw out the baby with the bath water here. A 20-color "menu" of
swatches in Outlook (since I'm using email now) takes up about 1cm x 4cm.
The equivalent menu with names (colored or not) would take up maybe 3cm x
20cm. And picking out a color by name is much slower than picking it out by,
well, color (for those who see color).