Friedel en ander frappanthede

I've been interested in accessibility for some time and I believe that there are several areas of intersection between accessibility and localisation. For example: what does a translated program help if there isn't a screen reader in the particular language? The recent posts about accessibility on the GNOME planet probably inspired me to improve things in Virtaal.

Virtaal highlights certain elements of translations such as XML tags and variables with colours for the sake of legibility. It is also easy to insert these placeable items without typing. This can drastically improve productivity. Until recently we still hard-coded the colours in the code, which obviously meant that it didn't work well with inverse themes (light text on a dark background).

With the release of Virtaal 0.6 I was very pleased with the improvements that we made. We work much better with GTK themes now, which means that we work better with inverse themes. Furthermore we improved the contrast for the inverse themes, and got very good feedback from a user that can now use Virtaal without problems.

Here are some of the improvements:

• The URL and XML tags are lighter, to ensure that they can still be read.
• When the search feature doesn't find anything, it has a red background (similar to Firefox). This background is now darker to ensure good contrast with the search text.
• The term for which there is a suggestion ("Download") has a dark background.
• The placeable item with numbers ("0.6.0") now has a darker background, and the foreground colour is quite light.

The last two were hard, because there should be good contrast between the foreground and the background, but the difference with normal text should also be clear. Since the normal text already has optimal contrast, this means that we are, in effect, making the contrast less.

This is all done automatically if Virtaal is running in an inverse theme. I am really happy that this works correctly without the user needing to look for anything or configure anything. It also updates if the system theme changes while Virtaal is running.