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Re: High Contrast Mode in Windows on Fire Fox

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From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: May 23, 2014 2:53PM

As usual you are the source of all things wise and wonderful and after 10 years I am still learning from you.

Whoa! They say that flattery will get you nowhere, but that line is actually strangely effective.... :)

Everything worked as expected with PDF documents but I now I am getting some strangeness with our LiveCycle forms. The form field areas are inheriting the windows text color but not the background color for the information entered. The form text is left as it was in the document. Are we doing something wrong in our development process that is defeating the foreground and background color inheritance. If you would like I can send you a form off line.

Ok, so here's the deal. The high-contrast tool in Reader has a limitation, and that is it changes the text color and the primary page background color only. There's so much going on in a PDF document that developing a heuristic to determine what page objects are playing the role of background colored objects with text in front and similarly for text what the color of its background is. This is the same problem that Apple solved by just implementing an invert option and Windows solved by removing many background areas in high contrast mode. So it isn't a great solution and I'm talking with the team about it. What happens is that when you create a page and add a black background to the page and use white text, the high contrast feature makes the white primary page background black (or whatever color you've set), the text from white to black (again, based on settings) and the black background doesn't change. The result is black text on a black background. Ugh.

You can hit select all on your document to see if you get the same result - the text will appear when selected (no, I'm not suggesting user select text as a solution).
AWK

On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 3:21 PM, Andrew Kirkpatrick < <EMAIL REMOVED> >wrote:

> Interestingly Adobe Reader does the same thing with documents - the
> controls for reader are displayed in high contrast and the displayed
> document is left the same as the original. More fodder for the folks
> who find PDF accessibility less than sufficient. And more fuel for me
> to continue insist that we publish all of our critical program
> information in HTML.
>
> Michael, this statement isn't exactly accurate. Reader gives the user
> choices. In the preferences for Reader and Acrobat you can choose how
> reader responds to high-contrast mode. If you select "replace
> document colors" you can set it to match the Windows color scheme, or
> you can choose a different color combination. If you choose the
> windows color scheme and then set the windows high contrast setting,
> you'll notice a difference in the PDF document content also.
>
> For that matter, in Firefox there is a setting in the "content" tab
> that allows you to adjust the colors for the content, and there is a
> checkbox that reads "use system colors". When checked you set the
> experience that I think you are probably expecting.
>
> Hope this helps,
> AWK
> > > list messages to <EMAIL REMOVED>
>