Use of the Colour Sliders
This page is related to my text colour readability page, where by the use of sliders you can see the effect of coloured text over different coloured backgrounds.
The text colour readability page assumes that you have 16,777,216 colours available. That is, 256³, 256 each of the additive primary colours, red, green and blue. But you may not have all 16,777,216 available and even if you have, you cannot get this number of colours using the sliders.
On a Mac, I think you most likely will have the full 16,777,216. On a Windows pc, you can check by going to Start, Control Panel, Display, and then the Settings tab. The settings should show at least 32-bit colour for the full 16,777,216 to be available. On any other system, eg a Unix Windows shell, you'll probably know what you have.
If you haven’t the full 16,777,216 available, then so far as text colour readability is concerned it shouldn’t make too much difference I think, though I'm not sure. An enhancement to my formulas will be to accommodate this. It’s on the to-do list.
As for the sliders on my text colour readability page, they are 120 pixels high, so there’s no way in which 256 colour gradations can be obtained – there’s no way that the system can detect a mouse movement by half a pixel.
But you'll notice that this makes no noticeable difference, the colours appear to gradate smoothly as you move the slider, or at least they do in a decent web browser; I’ve found that with, yes, you’ve guessed it, Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE), moving the sliders sometimes causes the colours to change rather jumpily. I don’t have any explanation for this, short of the standard one that IE is famous for driving programmers bonkers with its quirky behaviours.
You can type the colour values in the Text Colour and Background Colour boxes (and then click Set Colours)
This page is by way of explanation, now please got to my text colour readability page and enjoy!