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ManifoldScholar
Add option to change reader highlight color
Rationale
In Manifold's experimental learning applications at the University of Washington, several students reported that they found the highlights hard to see. People experience color in very different ways, there are several different types of common color blindness that cause people to experience yellow highlighted text differently with very different results. Providing several options for highlighter color would make highlighting in the reader a more comfortable experience for many people.
Proposed Changes
This option could be implemented very closely to how options like font, background color, and text margin are implemented in the reader currently. The user could choose from a grouping of radio buttons with several common highlighter colors, be given a color picker to choose their highlighter color, or some combination of these options. I think a color picker might be excessive for this, but worth considering. Users should at least have the option to choose between a yellow, blue, pink, or green. The highlighter colors chosen would of course have to meet WCAG contrast standards when used in the reader.
Would like to discuss this one with the team, as the colors currently carry (subtle) meaning around whether or not the annotation or highlight belongs to the current user, the author, or another reader. I'm by no means married to yellow, but I wonder it's possible to get at a palette that can be fixed and accessible.
I see, I hadn't noticed that when testing. What if the user could pick the hue and then a variation of shade was used to reflect who made the comment?
Adding feature label, which will raise this for discussion during our regular team meeting.
Accessibility Triage Notes: UW's ATX team considers this a priority 2 issue, as it is relatively complex, but the annotation feature is a pretty major feature in Manifold. The gold standard is to have a high contrast option enabled by default. Manifold's current color set works relatively well, but there are certain types of colorblindness that would have difficulty using this feature. Using a tool like the Colorblinding extension on Google Chrome can help illustrate these difficulties.
As Ava mentioned, allowing users to pick from variations of both color and hue would help. Potentially, adding an alternative form of selecting text (underlining for example), could also help.
Thank you for taking the time to open this feature request. The Manifold team reviewed this issue during our bi-weekly meeting and the consensus is that this feature makes sense and is in keeping with our overall vision for the platform. Moreover, we see this request as a viable candidate for development under our current available funding. We’re adding a “planned” label to this feature to indicate that we plan on completing it within our current funding cycle.
This was an automated message, but please don't hesitate to reply. Our team watches these issues closely and will respond as soon as we're able to!
Quick notes — add property to use to enable a high contrast mode for Manifold in which things that can't easily be given proper contrast become high contrast, such as highlights.