Can the keyboard keys & sheet music colours be changed?

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Always the latest versions: [ colors.xml | ui.xml ]
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nicciglen
Posts: 1

Post by nicciglen »

Hi there,

I'm new here. I've been eyeing out Synthesia since it's inception and finally tried and paid for it. (better later than never hey?)

My immediate problem. I have a severe light sensivity condition related to photosensitive migraines and a thing called visual stress. White backgrounds, white graphics and even text can be really uncomfortable, cause headaches, trigger migraines, and generally be a pain in the posterior to use on the computer screen. (yes I have turned down the screen brightness and contast via the usual external controls and also through the driver configuration).

So - an urgent request for some accessibility related advice, so I can start using this wonderful program:
Can I tweak the colours of the keys on the keyboard (sharps and main keys), and also the background and note colours used on the sheet music bar?

Using Synthesia just for a few minutes caused me to get quite a bad headache (any more, and a migraine would have started). Yes, I'm using the (classic) grey theme (it would make it more comfortable if I could tweak the classic grey UI theme to be more back as well).

Can these colours be changed (most importantly, the keyboard at the bottom, and sheet music at top). I work best with a pitch black background, a custom shade of green for text and main graphics, and a semi-dark grey for other things. Yes, I know you can change the colours of the dropping note bars (ideally I would need more control over those as well for better comfort still).

Looking forward to any feedback.

ps. I have been a software developer for over two decades, so don't mind tinkering under the hood if needed. (but I would prefer to only change configs to meet the ends I need)

Thanks in advance

Glen
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

You should be able to drop the "colors.xml" file (from the pink box at the top of this page) into the Synthesia data directory (see the Getting Started link in the same pink box), and start modifying some of the things there.

Change the "keyboardWhiteKeys" value to adjust the white key color.

There are quite a few entries that contain the word "text", which should let you get green where you need it.

Unfortunately, the white on the sheet music is hard-coded into the app at the moment. I just added an item to our list for the next update to pull that out into a setting in the same file.
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