My earlier post about thinking abstractly in relation to language to text works because when a user is put through something, and must deal with it for a bit, hopefully they will be more sensitive to others who might deal with a circumstance all the time.

Case-in-point:  Colours.  Why is it that so many developers just ASSUME I'm going to use the standard Windows colour scheme, and then decide that using system colours or transparent colour is too much work, and that they'll just set it to White, since it works?

While talking about background colours in VS.NET, I remembered that this of course applies to many applications.  In fact, a while back, I tried to switch the background text color to a nice gray.  I found out that my system looked like crap, since over half of the apps I use don't play nice.  Some are unreadable, others hurt a LOT to read.  I think it was a version of some CD burning software that decided to use Red (FF0000) for some text.  Red next to the gray I used turned out to be an optical illusion of pain.

Websites have the same problem too, although most of them have the inverse problem.  The designers want the background to be white, and rely on the default.  This is NOT necessarily a bad thing.  If I set my colour scheme for a dark background, I'd enjoy reading/writing text on a site with a dark background (all the white on my own site is starting to annoy me...).

Eventually, I ended up going back to a white background, painful as it is.  But, it's been a while, and perhaps devs are smarter now?  I'm going to go switch now and see how things work out.