Launcher improvement for vision loss people

[Bartosz Kosiorek]

One one the most annoying problem for vision loss people, is readability of the currently opened applications in launcher.

After open the new applications they has problems with notice, which application are already opened. There is only small arrow on the left side of icon. In Windows 7 there is no such problem.

My suggestion is implement some more readable arrows/marks or change behaviour of it.

There is several ideas to improve visibility of currently opened applications:
1. Enable Backlight Toggles, by default: http://i.stack.imgur.com/Yj66g.png
2. Changes size of the backlight. If the application is not run, the size of the backlight will be small. If you run application the size of the backlight icon will be larger.
3. Add border to already opened application
4. Change size of the icons. If the application is not run, the size of the icon will be small. If you run application the size of the application icon will be larger.

Is is very important to improve the default look of currently opened applications in launcher.
With this problem solved, the productivity of vision loss with ubuntu will be much higher.

[Omer Akram (om26er)]

marked incomplete as this needs design input. thanks for the bug report.

[Bartosz Kosiorek (gang65)]

Some time ago there was an discussion about Enable Backlight Toggles by default in Unity/Unity-2d.
Here is the details of the discussion.
https://lists.launchpad.net/ayatana-dev/msg00147.html

I hope it helps to make decission...

[Christian Giordano (nuthinking)]

While using the backlight can be a really beautiful and clear pattern, unfortunately some icons won't really be affected by it. Said that, we should definitely think about how to improve the visibility of some elements like the Launcher tiles, for people with sight problems.
My personal opinion is that a specialised theme should address these issues. So we should make sure that some challenging visuals can be themable.

[Bartosz Kosiorek (gang65)]

There is many ways of improve.
It is really easy to implement Backlight Toggles, and it is huge improvement for my friend (he tested it about one month).

Of course it is also good idea to change the default theme, to be more readable.

Is any chance to make this changes (even small improvements) in Ubuntu 12.04?