Room list blur effect should have a way to turn it off

[turt2live]

Design concerns:

• What does 'off' look like? (yes, we know that Firefox doesn't support the effect however this design hasn't been properly validated)
• Remove background image
• Remove blur

[MacLemon]

Remove both background image and blur. They're superfluous eye candy that reduces legibility and nobody wants a blurry version of themselves staring back at them. At least provide a user-accessible switch in preferences to get rid of both to help with basic accessibility for those with vision impairments suffering from the legibility problems caused by this.

Off means the same plain background, like the one used in the main chat section. (I assume the blurry background is not there because it makes chat hard to read.) :-)

Thanks for caring about accessibility!

[niquewoodhouse]

Thanks @turt2live for thinking of this - I'm personally finding it a bit harder now to scan and read the room list so I'd probably be one of the first to try this.

[niquewoodhouse]

We could add some options in settings > appearance

WIP:

[dkasak]

I'd like to add a #metoo here. I just went on the journey of "my room list is really ugly and unreadable; what is this smudge behind it, is my monitor broken?", followed by hiding the room list from the devtools to find my blurry avatar and thinking it's a bug, then finally finding these issues.

I tried searching for the original PR/rationale for the introduction of this change but wasn't able to find it. Judging by the number of users complaining about it, I don't think it's a reasonable one.

[t3chguy]

I tried searching for the original PR/rationale for the introduction of this change but wasn't able to find it.

It was a conscious design decision as part of the Riot->Element rebranding

[aspacca]

for what it's worth: I've an animated GIF as profile image and the result is very annoiying :)
+1

[SimonBrandner]

If we were to actually do this, we might as well allow setting a custom image

[Penguin-Guru]

I just set a (fairly light tone) profile picture while using the dark theme and the left sidebar(s) have become distractingly light. It's very hard for me to focus on the chat panel like this. The "spaces" bar on the far left is especially distracting because it is lightest and right in the middle of my monitor when I have the chat window on the right side of my screen. Please add a feature to adjust the colour (supposedly caused by blur) of these panels.

Personally, I would also like a way to reduce the visual footprint of the spaces list; perhaps collapsing it when there are no space notifications (assuming space notifications exist) or moving it somewhere that's not a full column on the left side. The bar was slightly distracting to me even when was darker.

[rda0]

I just set a (fairly light tone) profile picture while using the dark theme and the left sidebar(s) have become distractingly light. It's very hard for me to focus on the chat panel like this. The "spaces" bar on the far left is especially distracting because it is lightest and right in the middle of my monitor when I have the chat window on the right side of my screen.

I have a similar problem with my avatar, which consists of black and white colors only. The white portions of the avatar are distracting for me in the dark theme.

I am using a workaround to disable the room list and spaces bar background image completely, which is what I prefer anyway.

to disable it, in the console enter:

mxSettingsStore.setValue("RoomList.backgroundImage", null, "account", "DIE");

revert to default:

mxSettingsStore.setValue("RoomList.backgroundImage", null, "account", null);

[Penguin-Guru]

This is much better. Thank you! I didn't even know it was possible to access a dev tools like this. For anyone else who doesn't know, pressing Alt opens a top toolbar-- the View drop-down contains the dev tools toggle. Ctrl+Shift+I might also work.

[valynor]

I wasn't aware of the background blur thing until yesterday when I changed my pfp and I want to give you an example why it needs to go:

See that red "discoloration"? I literally thought my display was broken.

[ShadowJonathan]

Whenever i notice this, i'm often more distracted by this than not, see #20179, i'm really urging Design to make this opt-in at the very least.

[niquewoodhouse]

I'd personally really like to see this removed or be opt-in at the very least.

• The room list area is supposed to be navigation, so I think the design should be predictable and optimized for scanning/reading. Using this blur makes it impossible to predict what colours a user would see and therefore provide them a reliable interface and makes it harder to scan the room list.

It's one of the features you rely on for using the product.

[goshawk22]

Any update on this issue? As of 1.11.4 it is still bot possible to turn this off.

[HarHarLinks]

This is also an a11y issue because when setting an animated gif as avatar, it will play in the background of this blur effect.