Regarding accessibility, there are some useful comments here :
https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/1hbr5bo/kde_launcher_icons/
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@Canoe, if you’re of their mind, Can I force KDE applications to use Breeze outline icons rather than colourful ones, even when large? - #7 by rokejulianlockhart [1] may be of interest, for it requests separate symbolic and colourful icon themes.
Thanks @rokejulianlockhart , may I ask, are you visually impaired? I think one of the key areas people miss with a11y is that it’s not black and white (pun intended) 
For those of us who are in that middle ground where we have low vision (not blind, but not fully able to see either), is that monochrome symbolic icons can actually make things cognitively worse at small sizes, - such as launcher menus and system trays.
I can still differentiate using colour, texture and depth, flat and grey is just a blurry mess at small sizes. Anecdotally, I’ve had reports from people with normal vision that they use colour and texture to differentiate too. With the hard-coded symbolic icons, I have to actively try and read what that icon is, rather than going, “oh, that’s a blue icon, it’s x!” - cognitively, that recognition of colour takes milliseconds. Having to scan and work out what icon is what, based on the text that relates to them, takes seconds, many seconds. It all adds up.
Appreciate the incredible work that @ngraham and the VDG group do. All I’d ask, is that a11y be something we look at as more than just a binary situation. People have varying degrees of vision, and low vision, and often that variance is temperamental. Thankfully I can work around this by using other icon themes for now, and the application menu, rather than the launcher. But hardcoding icons with no ability to switch, does affect your users. Sometimes that’s a net negative.
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Oh, good to see some improvements in this field 
! I’ve just received a graphics tablet this Christmas (to help me with making some lo-res textures for modding a 2000 game). I use an ultrawide screen, so I wanted to have my new tablet mapped to a part of the screen (so the opposite of what is new), but the settings seem kinda broken, the widget used to assign the parts to be used doesn’t work at all. Nice too see it working as intended in your screenshots.
That’s me, for example. I find colorful skeuomorphic icons way easier to differentiate than black-and-white flat ones. Way faster, in the first place. Especially if I don’t know the context (app, menu, etc.) very well.
Yet still both are definitely better than text only. Using new GIMP 3.0 RC2 is extremely irritating for me, close to unusable, because they removed icons from their vast and numerous menus. I hope KDE doesn’t go that way.
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Really good job.
Tried KDE Neon on a tablet computer recently with built in Wacom and touchscreen, and it worked really well! Only Gwenview was working poorly with a touch screen.
However, a setting to make the on-screen-keyboard smaller would be good for laptops with lower resolution. Where would be the best place to make such change requests?
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@Canoe, (you may), but I’m not. I might be psychologically, though, for I’m one of the seemingly very few people in the whole world that actually finds text easier to parse than iconography!
Luckily, this means I experience many of the same problems that those with visual impairment do when trying to change their preferences to fit what’s easiest for them (as it applies to icon/text label consistency between applications) because too many sidebars and toolbars (etcetera) hardcode:
With the recent removal of the size override from kcm_icons being an explicit acknowledgement that this situation is dire, we’ve all got to put the work in, because it’s cut out for us.
On the subject of the symbolic vs colorful icons, I brought it up internally for us to discuss: Symbolic Kickoff category icons in Plasma 6.2 have gathered some complaints (#142) · Issues · Plasma / Plasma Desktop · GitLab
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very punny
I’m with you on this, for the opposite reason. I love the monochrome icons because it’s easy to control the contrast of them and my eyes give me the uncommon need for low contrast. I wish I could have the symbolic icons all over the place.
It’s a tough job for a dev to please us all.
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Take the accessibility argument really seriously and rethink symbolic icons in general.
I feel like the recent influx of complaints may have given the impression that the symbolic icons are only ever bad for a11y. Sometimes they’re really great!
There are people who need to control contrast, reduce colour, avoid specific colours, see shapes better than colour,etc etc. Symbolic icons are really nice in those cases, I thought maybe I should shed some light on that.
I repeatedly see you throwing extra effort into a11y and it’s really appreciated by us all.
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Hey, we recently had a discussion about a change to the Breeze dark theme and how high contrast should be. There I explained that from the studies I have read, higher contrast is on average better for everyone even to the extreme (i.e. pure black text on white background or pure white text on black background). Exceptions to this would be people who have problems with glaring brightness and similarly halation (halation - Wiktionary, the free dictionary).
Do you fall into one of those camps? Otherwise I would be interested to learn the name of a condition we might need to be aware of.
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@Drogoslaw, @pallaswept, and @Canoe, does Symbolic Kickoff category icons in Plasma 6.2 have gathered some complaints (#142) · Issues · Plasma / Plasma Desktop · GitLab incorporate your disparate grievances at all well?
I guess the lesson here is that there’s no such thing as “better for accessibility” because people have different needs. Something that’s good for one person’s accessibly may harm another’s. Seems like it supports the idea of making anything that falls under this umbrella configurable.
It’s funny, it’s long been a point of interest for me that the need for high contrast was well accounted for (eg going back to DOS-based MS Windows there was always a ‘High Contrast’ colour scheme), yet the need for low contrast is almost unknown.
From what I can gather, this is largely a matter of ‘high contrast helps with eye problems, low contrast helps with brain problems’. Since eye problems are common, if you’re talking about contrast in a11y, you’re probably aiming for higher contrast…
It’s even difficult to search for research about high contrast sensitivity, because the terms are identical, just the roles reversed 
There is research out there though, most of it falls under text legibility vs fatigue (see: gruvbox. how I love gruvbox.) and migraine.
Since my migraines are always preceded (caused? they can’t decide) by this problem, and it’s very common among migraine sufferers, my Doctors just call it a migraine symptom, although I often suffer the eyesight problems without the migraine. Sorry I can’t give you a more precise name and diagnosis, I wish my doctors could give me one!
It does increase visibility in the traditional, optical sense, but in my case, that’d be bad. When my nervous system decides I’ve had enough good days, I experience excessive persistence of vision. My issue is not that I can’t see, it’s that I’m seeing too much. I’m still seeing all the things I looked at a long time ago.
Low contrast UI means that I get a kind of blurry cloud behind everything, which sucks, but high contrast means I get a bunch of lines and shapes and blobs behind everything, which fries my brain trying to do shape recognition on non-shapes… I could go into detail on this but I don’t want to bore you.
I did find one relevant link for you regarding this, perhaps their sources might be useful to you:
https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/contrast-minimum.html
Some people with cognitive disabilities require color combinations or hues that have low contrast, and therefore we allow and encourage authors to provide mechanisms to adjust the foreground and background colors of the content.
My health problems are neurological but not cognitive (perhaps surprisingly hahah), but… you get the idea…
Maybe useful food for thought: Firefox’s userContent/userChrome.css support is an absolute Godsend, I couldn’t use the internet without it. Atop any given icon, a combo of opacity, tint, hue rotation, inversion, and greyscaling, takes care of just about everyone’s needs. Add an ‘outline’ style icon theme (like breeze symbolic) and I think that’s the whole gamut taken care of.
Even if it has low ease of use, but near-infinite flexibility, that is a fine approach, for those who really need it. We’re just glad we have a solution, even if it is hard to apply.
Hope that helps, and thanks to you, too, for your work on this.
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Thank you for the detailed response!
Okay, so I wasn’t advising everyone wrongly then. 
I think this is interesting. So I guess it might not be too wrong to simplify this in communication as a sort of sensory overload situation which some users have. The most extreme condition in this regard might be ME/CFS (Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome - Wikipedia) which forces some people to lie down in a dark and quiet room all day. There are probably some people who would therefore prefer a computer usage that is close to that experience i.e. low brightness, low contrast, no animations, no sounds. Of course that can’t be the default, but any configuration options in that direction might make sense.
Yes, seems like there is no such thing as over-configurability when it comes to basic readability of the user interface like fonts and icons.
It does. You are welcome! If anything else seems relevant to you or comes to mind later, please feel welcome to reach out again!
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Yes, landed in the git repo a day ago!
Well, that too, but what I meant to say was… I mean, taking into consideration that implementing something so flexible might be difficult, it seems reasonable for developers to take any short cuts which might make it easier to implement.
You’re bang-on the money. I’m negative for ME but I’ve been tested more than once, you’ve got the right idea. All my displays are on minimum brightness, low contrast mods everywhere, no(or very fast) animations, reduced motion options on everywhere, and a modified sound theme. You’ve got it 100% right. And yes, it would make a terrible default
I started to list a bunch of similar changes I make, just to demonstrate, but deleted it when I realised how insanely long that list really was going to be (like… Wow.). I feel that I should say: KDE already does handle stuff like this incredibly well.
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Thanks! I’ll look for it now
It’s a very interesting observation overall that both high contrast and low contrast can be good for accessibility.
We could consider our current symbolic icons a part of a “low contrast” mode, and give them some subtle color for a new “default contrast” mode. This could could be done via internal CSS, so it just turns on and off, no need to swap out a different icon theme. A high contrast mode would probably involve a whole different icon theme and dispense with the symbolic icons entirely in favor of full-color ones — which would of course need to be created and maintained, and that adds some risk. In the meantime, the new default contrast icons with a little but of color would have to suffice.
Yay!
Considering how many people might have some similar needs as you have (might be as high as 1% IMO as already 0.7% are registered in Germany to have ME/CFS), it might even make sense for KDE to provide a “Low Contrast Colour Scheme for People With Neurological Conditions”. Of course for this we 1. need the idea, 2. a plan what to do, 3. agreement to the plan, 4. someone to work on this. Not sure though if there is some one-size-fits-many solution there in the first place.
Anyways, I am mostly rambling, but there is theoretically a way forward here.
The widget in 6.2 is known to be a little weird especially on different aspect ratios. I rewrote a lot of it in 6.3, and hopefully it’ll work much better.
In regards to icons, maybe it would make sense to split symbolic icons and full-size/normal icons when it comes to theming? Maybe an extra tab in the icon settings for the symbolic ones where one can then choose between different themes and additionally how the icons should be coloured. I imagine that a symbolic icons pack would provide at least a monochrome variant which gets its colour from the plasma colour theme but can be made darker or brighter with a slider, and optionally a colorful variant. Also the icon size could be set independently, maybe?
The benefits in terms of accessibility would be that you can more directly change only the part that’s bothering you (and have more options for that too), instead of having to find an icon pack that has both normal icons and symbolic icons that fit you. And people could create icon packs that only contain the symbolic icons, to fit specific needs, without those packs being tethered to the specific full-size icons that they are set to inherit.
A side benefit is that all those broken (and abandoned) plasma 5 era (or earlier) icon themes would suddenly be useable again.
Or maybe not, idk