Last modified: 2014-06-25 08:22:48 UTC
The colors used to mark diffs are unnecessarily light. They work well when whole words or sentences are changed, but for single characters or spaces i almost need to stick my nose to the screen to find what is changing. See for instance: https://ca.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anarquisme_a_Espanya&curid=1010721&diff=12614384&oldid=12591573 Please use colors with higher contrast with the white background.
See for instance the darker red/green colors used to mark specific changes at https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/100000/1/ProofreadPage.i18n.php For what is worth, mobile is also using darker red/green (in a confusing way, but that is out of scope here): https://ca.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anarquisme_a_Espanya&curid=1010721&diff=12614384&oldid=12591573
Light colours are used for accessibility reasons, in order to maintain a good contrast with the foreground (text). See bug 11374. Translatewiki puts a dotted border around the text being changed, e.g. https://translatewiki.net/w/i.php?diff=5191317&oldid=5191063 which might be good for visibility, even if not especially attractive.
Ok, point taken. Still, If I don't see the changes, someone with visual impairment will have even a harder time. Maybe the current rule works (although I would still welcome consistency of colors between mobile and desktop). However, maybe a different behavior could be designed for one character changes, where the light colors is easy to be camouflaged? The dotted border isn't attractive indeed, but at least does the job you want to do when looking at a diff.
The last time we discussed diff colors it was a 5 month ordeal.... :D
Can we just close this and move on?
Let me try again: Looking at a diff, it is very difficult to find changes in added/removed spaces because the colors used by default don't have much contrast with the white background. It is difficult for an average person with an average screen, and I guess it is even harder with users with visual impairment. See for instance https://ca.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anarquisme_a_Espanya&curid=1010721&diff=12614384&oldid=12591573 The current colors are fine to mark changes in text since the text itself is marked in bold. However, in the case of spaces there are no characters involved. One solution could be to use only in this situation the darker version of the same colors that is being used for the border of the box of the paragraphs changed. Without changing any color scheme, this would provide enough contrast to find easily those single spaces in diffs.
Using background colours may be the wrong approach for exactly this reason - to get the contrast high enough for spaces to stand out (or even show up, depending on your screen and/or eyesight), you wind up with contrast too high to easily read the text itself. Using bolding and colour worked well before for the text, but that didn't show space changes. The dotted border is probably more along the lines of what we would want - either a border, or a colourful underline (like what spellcheckers do), or some other kind of formatting change that doesn't interfere with the text itself. Regardless of what you do, though, some people will find it ugly. That's just a given.
Change 106763 had a related patch set uploaded by Jackmcbarn: Increase changed text background contrast https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/106763
FYI: I use a small script to highlight white-space changes: https://pt.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Helder.wiki/Tools/HighlightSmallDiffs.js
