Error notification in R can't be seen by color blind student

Error notifications in R are colored red. I had a student last semester that could not see the color red and didn't even see them as grey. The lines were just not there for the student. Is there a way to recolor the error notifications to be a color that a color blind person could see?

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I don't have an answer to this, but think this is a fascinating and important question for the R community!

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In vanilla R, you can change the font colours quite easily.

Go to Edit and then GUI Preferences ....

At the bottomleft, you'll find options to change colours for the following:

  1. background
  2. normaltext
  3. usertext
  4. pagerbg
  5. pagertext
  6. highlight
  7. dataeditbg
  8. dataedittext
  9. dataedituser
  10. editorbg
  11. editortext

Select one of them and then you can choose the appropriate colour from the option Console and Pager Colours in your right.

But like Chris, I also don't have an answer, if your question is on RStudio. You can try different options provided in the Editor theme, though.

NOTE: This post is actually same as your earlier post here. Should these two topics be merged?

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RStudio has several different options of how code and the gui is coloured. Tools > global options > appearance and then in the editor theme it can be changed. Unfortunately there is no a predefined one for colour blindness (and I reckon that is complicated as there are different types of colour blindness, AFAIK), but I am pretty sure some of the predefined ones would suit for different colour blindness, specially those with dark background.
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Maybe having a basic theme, with white background and black letters (or the opposite) should be an easy to implement thing? I don't see at RStudio options, and while it may look boring to many (not a problem for them, just choose other), it may help others.
cheers

2 Likes

I was actually looking for some custom themes online, predefined for colour blindness. I couldn't find any, but then I came across TmThemeEditor.

This site will provide you a lot of options to generating a suitable custom theme. You'll just have to choose one, or you may need to modify a little bit depending on the requirements.

Then, you can just download this as a .tmTheme file and added to RStudio via Tools > Global Options... > Appearance > Add.You'll probably need the :package: xml2 to convert it to .rstheme file. There are detailed guidelines (with pictures) here.

Hope this helps.

6 Likes

Tht would help a lot, but I still think a basic theme for anyone won;t hurt either. I have never relized that problem til I meet someone in academia with it.
Well, it would be bad looking for many, but good enough for others, and that should be a big issue at the team of RStudio?
Having many colours around is amazing until is not. I and other mates take care as much as we can (and some journals do it too), but for a full 'eyed' guy is hard to imagine how bad can be a beauty plot to some others. And colour blinded people is out of most efforts to integrate and balablabla....
Best
Fer

Would you mind filing this as a bug report at https://github.com/rstudio/rstudio/issues? We plan specifically to improve the accessibility of the product in v1.3 and having this on the issue tracker will make sure we make this possible.

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I think I submitted the bug report, but I am not sure I did it correctly. I hope I did and the change can be made in the next version.

Looks great! The link for reference:

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