monitor colour settings

[undyingfires]

monochrome displays.. using a colour monitor?


I'd like to test the colour contrast of the pages on our site and I know there's sites out there that will test, but is it possible to downgrade or disable the colour on my own colour monitor?

You can get down to 256 colour.. but can I go lower?

Thanks


I realize that I can print out these pages on a black and white printer but wasting paper even though it's recycled is possibly something I'd like to avoid :)

[bradyj]

hmmm... now I wouldn't recommend doing that, but I'm unsure what exactly your doing:

Are you testing a print graphic on your monitor in B&W? If so, testing on your monitor won't actually give you a positive test anyways because I'm guessing that your monitor is not calibrated, and the actual 'dots' of the print will change per printer/screen and all that jazz.

If you are just testing a page to do it, I only know how to do that on a Macintosh, which is:

Open the Monitor Control Panels > select 'colors' and change your input display profile to one of the default 'grays'... but it looks like hell.

Either way, if you are doing it to test a print, you shouldn't have to. Playing with your monitor isn't the solution... just change your image to grayscale. If your in a vector program like illustrator or corel draw, select all your colors and choose grayscale in the color windows. And, since this is 'soft proofing' on your monitor, it STILL won't look right (unless your testing for the web, but then every monitor will view grayscale different because of it's calibration).

...long story short, test it on the printer if it's print. If it's for a company, and you need color accurate tests, send it to a professional print house. If your testing it for the web, change the graphics to grayscale and test, it's better so that you don't wack out your monitor any further. Otherwise, hopefully a PC guy will post a message if your not on a Mac.

[oracleguy]

I wouldn't worry about trying to go lower than 256 colors, you can go down to 16 colors with older versions of windows but I'm pretty sure after win98 that option was removed because you'd be hard pressed to find someone that uses only 16 colors on their monitor. If they do, I doubt they use the internet becuase it would look like absolute crap. It looks bad at just 256 colors.

It hasn't been since video cards used ISA that video card could only support 16 or less colors.

[undyingfires]

Well the story behind it all is this...

Our site has to be accessible to all types of visitors [to put it bluntly?]

If they are using a keyboard only, text readers, mono monitors [though I know this shouldn't be a major concern now-a-days] but for the colour-blind -- enough contrast.

We recently had a company check out a couple random pages from our site and none of the pages passed validation -- mind you they reported the same mistake over and over :rolleyes: which caused the report to end short and informed us the max number of errors was reached :o [which says that they had used a program for it].

Just researching w3c and other resources to find out the information we'd need to reach our goal for mid-year accessibility.

Black and white mono screens was read at one point so thought I'd try.

Anyhow from your answers, I won't bother. I will just ask our graphic pros to work out something for me :)


Thanks again :thumbsup:

[oracleguy]

You could always take a screenshot then load it up into photoshop and convert the image to gray scale.

[undyingfires]

:o should have thought of that