Sidebar contrast, font size, and theme options for vision impaired
Please consider adding options for font size and higher contrast in the sidebar, as well as a way to revert to the former light theme. For those with even mild visual impairment, dark themes can make reading troublesome, especially if the type is not bright white. Further, the font size seems to have shrunk with 1Password 7. Even for those with no vision issues, it can be hard to read small, low contrast type when screen resolution is set really high. Not all your users are millennials or fighter pilots. Us old guys like to be able to see our passwords too.
1Password Version: 1Password 7 Version 7.0.BETA-5 (70000005)
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: OS X 10.13.4
Sync Type: DropBox
Comments
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Hey @ottonomy! Thanks so much for the feedback. It's great to know that when 1Password is used differently, our design might not work for that use case. I totally see what you mean here. For increasing contrast in the sidebar, I'm going to chat with the team about making "Increase contrast" in the macOS accessibility preferences apply to that, but before I do I'm curious: Do you use that setting at all? It's in System Preferences > Accessibility.
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@Jacob, I don't use the Increase Contrast setting in the OS, because a great deal of the work I do on my computers involves deliberately seeing things the way others do. For the record, my vision is about as good as can be expected at age 50. I have my Retina display scaled for More Space, taking advantage of its resolution. I get along just fine with small type, as long as it has normal contrast levels. It's when a particular app or website decides to artfully make things easy on young eyes (dim text on darkish, but not actually dark background) that I find myself grumbling. Until 1Password joined that crowd, the only app which regularly drew my ire on that subject was Discord.
Depending on system level settings to deal with visibility in a specific app means compromising everything one does on a machine in order for one developer to avoid adding basic functionality. All this being said, I've never before felt the desire to adjust the font sizes in 1Password. You had apparently been sitting in a sweet spot, but the sidebar type in 7 is just really small and light, compared to the titles of items themselves. I understand the desire to make your users' content stand out from the rest of the app, but these things in the sidebar are categories, significant sections of the app, not mere footnotes. Even mod/creation dates of items are now in a larger type size than the sidebar items.
I've attached a screenshot of current 1Password 7 build above a mockup of a higher contrast, larger font version of the sidebar, which I think would work very well for those not in possession of eagle eyes, and another screenshot of 1Password in the context of my entire 15" Retina MBP screen, for an idea of how it looks in my typical work environment. On the 5K iMac, it all looks even tinier.
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Thanks @ottonomy, greatly appreciate the feedback! I did try to keep readability in mind with this redesign and continuously checked it against the WCAG 2.0 guidelines for color contrast accessibility as I worked on it. It's currently AA compliant and was AAA but I apparently made an opacity change on the text without realizing it so will definitely make some adjustments there. I don't believe we made the text any smaller than it was in version 6 but I will double check on that too. Having adjustable text sizing similar to iOS's dynamic type feature would be really nice and something we have wanted to look into more for a while.
Part of the point of the sidebar redesign was to separate it from your actual content and to help focus on the item list and details rather than the navigation, so making the type too large and super high contrast would go against that concept but we definitely don't want that to lead into readability issues.
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@danvpeterson, thank you so much for your detailed and thoughtful response. Is it possible that there is some system factor which could be causing 1Password 6 sidebar type to appear larger for me than it does for you? I'm attaching a screenshot of 1Password 6 running on my Mac Mini (where I haven't yet updated to 7), above a shot of 7 on my MacBook Pro.
Again, I understand your design goal, putting focus on the user content, but I think you've taken it further than need be. The dark theme, in and of itself, accomplishes that. De-emphasizing the type just makes the categories and such seem strangely undervalued. But beyond that, it appears that type size has been reduced on things within the user content as well. If I used a lower resolution on my screens, I might want smaller type, but without any adjustment for that available in the app, the decreased size makes everything harder to read...
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Hey @ottonomy, thanks for those screenshots! The type in your version 7 sidebar is definitely showing smaller than it should and I'm asking our developers to look into it. I'm sorry for the late reply, I was off for a few days. Here is your screenshot on the left vs. what it should look like in the current beta:
Hopefully it's something they can get fixed for the next beta but it'll depend on how easy it is for them to diagnose. I'm waiting to hear back if there is anything more they could use from you to help figure it out.
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FWIW the text in my sidebar is rendered exactly the same as the example on the left of your comparison (compared by overlaying screenshots in Photoshop).
Fortunately it's not a problem for me, but please let me know if I can be of any help.
1P7 beta 6 with macOS 10.12.6 on a MacBook Pro Retina 15" at 1680x1050 resolution.
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@ottonomy & @TonyHall one of my developers just discovered that the font size there is tied to the system setting for sidebars. If you open System Preferences and select General there is a setting for "Sidebar icon size"
By default it is "Medium" but you may have changed yours to "Small" at some point, please tell me if that's not the case. Apparently, the way that we coded our sidebar, it automatically honored this setting for the font size but not the icons. We are looking into how we want to handle this now that we know where it's coming from.
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@danvpeterson
Confirmed - my setting for Sidebar icon size is "Small".
(I know you asked us to say if that was not the case, but I didn't want you to think your reply had fallen on deaf ears :) ).0 -
I appreciate you didn't ask for any input as to how this should be handled, but... :)
If 1P's sidebar icons don't have a smaller option (along with a more compact layout - the reason I use this OS preference setting) then shrinking the text in 1P is pointless and unwanted behaviour.
While I'm offering my unsolicited views wrt the interface...https://discussions.agilebits.com/discussion/comment/422451#Comment_422451
Many thanks for your time.
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@danvpeterson Indeed, I do also have my Finder sidebar icon size set to Small, and for the same reasons as @TonyHall. I want content in the sidebar, not space.
Frankly, I was rather astonished to discover that the font size in my Finder sidebar is the same as that about which I was complaining with 1Password 7. This leads me back to the original point of my topic here: Contrast (or lack thereof). I would likely never have noticed the decreased size of the 1P7 sidebar fonts, had the dark theme not been introduced, and they were black on white. I have no problem viewing small text in a dark theme when the contrast is reasonably high, but grey type on a not-very-dark background is challenging for me. You might say "Well, why don't you set your resolution lower, or increase the system sidebar icon size setting?", but that would disrupt my productivity and interfere with the other things I do on my machines. On the MacBook Pro, I make heavy use of the Finder sidebar. With any other size setting, I can't see all my sidebar items even with the window maximized.
Note in my screenshot that although the 1P7 fonts do match the size in the Finder, there are only 3 1P7 items in the same space 4 items fit in the Finder. As TonyHall pointed out, matching the smaller font size of the Finder setting makes no sense in 1Password if the icons and compact format don't follow as well.
To sum up, perhaps the easiest way for you to accommodate not just me, but anyone in your intended audience who has trouble reading lower contrast text, whether impaired or just because of system setting preferences, would be to offer an option to turn off the dark theme in the sidebar.
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My sidebar setting is medium and I am having a lot more trouble seeing the sidebar clearly (again older eyes). Also even though comparing the password panel (3rd panel) to version 6, the fonts are the same size, I am having more problem seeing those too. I think maybe because of the gray around it and the fact that the light gray words (e.g. password) are in smaller font. I much prefer the simpler design (the new design looks nice but it is a strain for my eyes and I already have my resolution scaled back to 1280x800.
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Thanks again for all the feedback everyone. I will definitely be making some adjustments to the contrast as I mentioned earlier and regarding the system sidebar preference, I think we either need to resize everything (font, icons, and number counts) to make the view more compact, or don't honor the system setting and potentially do our own in the future. I'll be working with our developers to get some of these changes in place as soon as we can.
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@danvpeterson Thank you! Whichever way you choose to go with this, I appreciate your listening, and your efforts to help.
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Absolutely any time @ottonomy, that's what I'm here for and I'm super lucky to work on something that has so many passionate users that are willing to spend the time to give us feedback like this. Greatly appreciated.
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