Thoughts on the new color vision deficient color tables

[brugger1]

The new color vision deficient color tables are super cool!!

When I now go to change the color table, say in the pseudocolor plot, the menu of color tables takes up almost all of a 1920x1080 screen. I went to the color table window since I thought there was a way to group color tables by category and I found a "Group tables by Category" setting. I turned that on and went back to the pseudocolor plot and I found 3 categories, which was way better!!

Should this be the default?

The categories were "CvdFriendlyCrameri", "CvdFriendlyViridis" and "Standard". I had no idea what "Cvd" meant. When I googled this I found "Cardio Vascular Disease", which I figured was wrong. I then went to the release notes and found it was "Color Vision Deficient". I'm not sure what a better name is, but this wasn't obvious. The "CvdFriendlyCrameri" still seemed pretty large. Is it possible to further categorize the color tables.

[brugger1]

I also noticed that name of the selected color table was cut off on the pulldown menu button. I looks like there is plenty of space for a wider pulldown menu button on the pseudocolor plot window. I don't know about the other places where it is used.

[markcmiller86]

I did wonder about CVD terminology. I wasn't the most fond of Color Blind however. And, I think most people who suffer from color vision deficiency are likely to be familiar with CVD. However, that also suggests a bad bias in that in suggests only people with CVD would care about color tables for it. I think everyone who wants to create accessible color choices would care.

The CvdFriendlyCrameri can indeed be further categorized as our docs might suggest (sequential, divergent, multi-sequential, cyclic and jumbled). We don't have the ability to define folders of folders for color tables (maybe we should) but we can add more top-level categories.

I wanted to give the GUI a link to the doc section on color tables but didn't see an easy way to do that. As an aside, I exchanged some emails with @BradWhitlock about possiblity of doing some really simple context sensitive help in VisIt GUI that would send users to associated sections of our docs. This would avoid the massive investment I think required to use Qt's native help system.

[markcmiller86]

Should this (Group tables by category) be the default?

Maybe it should be when number of color tables exceeds some threshold...maybe a top-to-bottom of screen menu's worth of names, say like 50

[markcmiller86]

I wasn't certain of that. What if users remove many or what if we switched to minimizing the number in the install point but had tools for users to easily go get more and add them to their ~/.visit dir?

[brugger1]

Ah Yes, if users had significantly fewer color tables then that would make sense!

I think that would be a great enhancement, but it would be some amount of effort. I think adding the threshold would be a good thing to add when making that broader enhancement. I'm more concerned about something we could do quicker, since the list is pretty unwieldy at the moment.

[markcmiller86]

I'm more concerned about something we could do quicker, since the list is pretty unwieldy at the moment.

I'm sorry 🤔 Yes. That makes perfect sense. Just change the default setting for now.

[brugger1]

Was enhancing how we deal with color tables part of one of the summer intern projects you had in mind?

[markcmiller86]

Its one on the list but specifics haven't been discussed with prospective students yet. I am awaiting knowledge of acceptances of offers from ECP SRP-HPC program before we start engaging on that.