@Harley Acheson (harley) @Hans Goudey (HooglyBoogly) You both worked on T68448 and this doesn't seem to be significantly better in the current version. It looks like this was improved in 2.83.9, but 2.90.1 and later is back to the worse contrast.

2.83.9:

2.92:

The contrast does seem a bit better than the screenshot posted in the ticket, but with the fade in and the small size at the bottom of the screen, this does seem a bit hard to read.

That's because we decided that I should make a last minute solution just for 2.83 and that we would have a better fix for 2.90. I honestly don't remember what happened to that plan, but the way it turned out should have been predictable anyway.

I think the plans for that blew up because I had two separate patches, one that made changes to Info Editor (that got accepted) and another for the status bar warnings (that wasn't noticed in time).

Both areas use the same color preferences and I had to make changes to them when Info Editor started using them them differently. Rather than color entire rows or text text or icon, it instead only colored the backgrounds of the icons. This gave each row and icon similar strength because the square background stays the same size, but some icons have more or less content (some filled in and others not). But doing it this way also means making all the text colors the same. This way each row looks similar except for the icon.

This worked well for Info Editor but the related issues with the status bar messages were worse and became even worse with the above color changes. That separate patch did a similar thing for those messages. It used color only for the icon background and left the rest of the text similar to the other text on the status bar. With a yellow used for warning there really isn't a way to use that for text color or text background color and have it readable. This did result in these alerts looking a little less alert-y, but seemed okay. It was something new showing up on the status bar, had motion, and the color of the icon background color looked alarming enough.

I didn't revisit that old patch only because I thought someone (can't remember) had some plans for it and they wanted to add new color preferences just for those. I hate the idea of adding yet more preferences for yet more shades of green, red, and yellow so was just waiting for that to happen. Within a unified themed application I can't think of a good reason why the icons you see in Info Editor can't be used as-is on the status bar, especially since they are both the same information and I was trying to connect these two disparate things.

Regardless of further changes we wanted to do - why is this issue back? IIRC we added separate theme colors for the warning background. Did that change not get merged back into master?

Right, as the original commit (rB7fc0053c27e5: UI: Fix T77173: Report Background Colors for 2.83 Release) mentions, it was meant to be a temporary solution for the 2.83 release with a better solution for 2.90 (D7203).

IIRC we added separate theme colors for the warning background. Did that change not get merged back into master?

As far as I know we at first did add separate theme colors as a temporary fix but that was reverted for some reason so that is not the case now. I wish the revert had a comment for the reason as that might inform this subject a bit. Afterward I thought someone else shoved some change in at the very last minute, but would love that detail too.

I thought I had looked at D7203 after the dust had settled and was disappointed that it was then harder or not viable any more. But can't recall the details.

I'll see if I can get us something like this for Monday (at latest, maybe by Jan 29) so we can take a look at it and see if it still works:

Hey, last time it was using a "-" instead of a ":" so this is an entirely new mistake. LOL