Colors don’t have to be “garish” to be accessible.
It’s clear you love this new highlighter update, but please don’t use an appeal to emotion against accessibility needs.
3 Likes
You misunderstood me. Maybe I misinterpreted a connection between garish colours and accessibility, but my intent wasn’t to emotion against accessibility needs. I just argued against the request to step back to one colour. If you reread my posts you will see that I supported all other parts of your requests
No one in this thread has argued to step back to one color. That misconstrues and demonizes everyone’s positions. I think all of us have said we would like to have the old option back as one among the others, but no one except you is posing it as an either/or. And none of the devs (at least so far) have stepped in and said it’s impossible to restore the old option. If it is, I’d like to hear it explicitly.
The old color was accessible to the 8 percent of the population that is red/green colorblind. The new color choices, apparently, are not. In an age in which designers are generally highly sensitive toward accessibility, how did this happen?
Isn‘t it possible to create a set of five colours which are distinguishable for people with red-green-blindness?
Just out of curiosity: If you just would use the Pastell green as one and only colour, then you or some colour blind person wouldn‘t see the marking?
I’m not a web designer. But web designers solve these challenges all the time (e.g., Trello with textured labels): Color Blind Accessibility: Web Design for Color Blindness.
I have to admit this upset me.
I wholeheartedly agree the previous highlights option had its limitations, but always had a colour that totally matched the theme that you chose. If you changed the theme, the highlight colour changed. This was a great design.
I understand that people want other highlight colour options. I have felt this myself for some time that it would be useful to have another highlight option. But the implementation here is very weak.
The default highlight option should be the colour according to the theme. It should be optional to change the highlight colour away from the default of the theme.
Please sort this out. Listen to the community we love this application and I don’t want it to turn into a poor version of itself.
5 Likes
I wonder if it is possible to have theme matched setting as the default and then have the five colour options. So now there is the ‘default’ colour among the rest.
With… a setting whether the colour of the letter follows the background too.
3 Likes
There are two primary kinds of red-green colorblindness, and a rarer blue-yellow, all of which are a bit different — it’s not that colors are invisible per se, but telling two colors apart can be difficult to impossible. Or you can see that two colors are different next to each other, but can’t define which is which “correctly.”
With certain combinations of highlights and backgrounds, it could get frustrating really quickly.
See Color blindness on Wikipedia for more.
1 Like
Without a doubt, I support one or more optional color palettes that enable accessibility for people who need it. I was just confused by the fact that on the one hand the lack of differentiation between the individual highlight colors was criticized, but then an option was demanded to return to the old system, where only one color exists. I still think that if you only want one color that doesn’t need to be distinguished from another because there is no other color, you can be just as happy with the new highlight system by using just one color. As I said, if people can no longer distinguish colors well from one another, then a set should be offered that takes visual impairment into account.
Hello everyone, thanks for caring so much about our work! I’ve tried to summarize the issues and possible solutions in a new topic here → New Highlighter: Addressing your feedback and next steps - #2
Feel free to add more feedback there 
Please let us know what would you like as a solution of the one we proposed in the other thread (or feel free to propose something else!)
I think we’re always trying to do that, and our aim is always to improve the app
I can assure you that we spent much time designing 5 colors and all their variation that could be adapted to all the themes. If there is a specific theme that you feel it’s not great, let me know and we can review it!
1 Like
There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution. Anyway, to answer your question, my main complaint is about light themes, especially Solarized and Olive Dunk. Fortunately, I haven’t updated Bear on my main computer, and I won’t do it until it’s strictly necessary.
2 Likes