🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Tue, Oct 10, 2017 01:20 PM UTC:
Looking at your list of colors on my Kindle, #E8E8E8 and #FFFF00 are hard to distinguish from each other, and #E0E0E0, #F0F000, #FFE000, and #00FFFF are also hard to distinguish from each other. There is very little difference between these and #D0D000. Lastly, #00B000, #FF0000, and #505050 look virtually the same. The most distinct color on the list is so dark I can barely read it on my Kindle. On my desktop, it reads #0000FF.
What I had in mind was switching from the use of colors to using some kind of image or images. I figure if you can put a piece on any space, you could also put a marker on a space. By having different shapes, image markers could remain more distinct on a greyscale screen. The one difficulty is that you might not be able to superimpose a marker on top of a piece. The way I got around this in Game Courier was to mark spaces with a border around a piece or space. This worked by changing the CSS for the piece, and it worked on empty spaces by using a small, resizable, transparent gif as the piece image on empty spaces. Another possibility, which I haven't tried out, would be to give each space a background image instead of a background color and to change this accordingly.
Whatever you use, it would be helpful to include a legend that will tell people what the different colors or markers mean. You may know what they mean, but the average visitor who comes across one of these diagrams will not. For example, I just looked at diagrams for the Rook and the Cannon in Metamachy, and the only difference between them is that one used a lighter shade of grey than the other. If you're turning Betza codes into diagrams, would it also be possible to translate these codes into written descriptions that could appear underneath a diagram?
Looking at your list of colors on my Kindle, #E8E8E8 and #FFFF00 are hard to distinguish from each other, and #E0E0E0, #F0F000, #FFE000, and #00FFFF are also hard to distinguish from each other. There is very little difference between these and #D0D000. Lastly, #00B000, #FF0000, and #505050 look virtually the same. The most distinct color on the list is so dark I can barely read it on my Kindle. On my desktop, it reads #0000FF.
What I had in mind was switching from the use of colors to using some kind of image or images. I figure if you can put a piece on any space, you could also put a marker on a space. By having different shapes, image markers could remain more distinct on a greyscale screen. The one difficulty is that you might not be able to superimpose a marker on top of a piece. The way I got around this in Game Courier was to mark spaces with a border around a piece or space. This worked by changing the CSS for the piece, and it worked on empty spaces by using a small, resizable, transparent gif as the piece image on empty spaces. Another possibility, which I haven't tried out, would be to give each space a background image instead of a background color and to change this accordingly.
Whatever you use, it would be helpful to include a legend that will tell people what the different colors or markers mean. You may know what they mean, but the average visitor who comes across one of these diagrams will not. For example, I just looked at diagrams for the Rook and the Cannon in Metamachy, and the only difference between them is that one used a lighter shade of grey than the other. If you're turning Betza codes into diagrams, would it also be possible to translate these codes into written descriptions that could appear underneath a diagram?