The quest for a high contrasting black mobile phone experience for low vision users – Part 2
As outlined in the article The quest for a high contrasting black mobile phone experience for low vision users Part 1, I outline how I need Bright Text on a Dark Black Background to be able to read anything comfortably and how I've spent hours and hours trying to find the best combination to get the high contrast black experience I want.
I've recently been experimenting with a fantastic app called the Team Black Out Updater. This app contains a directory of over 100 apps that have been "blacked out". This means that someone has gone into the official release of the app and manually edited the colors of the app to change them into a darker black.
Get the blackout updater app from the play store
Launch the Blackout Updater app and go to "Blacked Out".
Here you will find about 100 apps that have each been blacked out. Some of these apps require root access or have to be installed in your recovery screen. These requirements are clearly listed for each app. For most standard apps, like Firefox, you simply need to click the app, click download then click install when the download has completed. You will find everything from Facebook to Plume.
Note: if you haven’t enabled install unsigned
apps, a dialog will pop up and you need to do the following: click settings (or go into the settings screen for android), on the security screen scroll down to check “enable unknown apps” and than hit back and restart the installation process for the blacked out app.
One of the really great things you can do with a the help of the Team Black Out Updater & a few extra steps is get a truely high contrast browsing experience as outlined in the article Getting a dark (or inverted) browsing experience on Android .
If you have found any additional tips or trick to improve the experience, please share them in the comments below.
Jeffrey responds:
Posted: April 26th, 2014 at 1:36 pm →
Quick note, the team blackout’s blackout updater can now be found here: http://www.designrifts.com/teamblackedoutapp/
Arif Toker responds:
Posted: April 29th, 2014 at 6:11 pm →
A bit late to the party but oh well.. 🙂
As someone in the same situation as you I found the custom rom PAC rom has a very useful feature. In the settings you can set the rom to “PAC in Black” which changes most of the system apps to a high contrast version. It is also very easy to edit the DPI and get somewhat bigger font sizes.
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Jeffrey responds:
Posted: May 4th, 2014 at 8:16 pm →
This sounds really interesting. Do you have a link to this ROM or a list of devices PAC ROMs are made for?
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