Gryllida adds,
<<To be quite honest, the first thing that I see wrong in the visual editor is the black-and-white style of icons, similar to what Google products uses. It is not 1980s when everything was black-and-white, nor it is 1990s when people used 256-color icons; it is 2013. [...] I believe it is important for accessibility to at least let users choose from a set of themes for the VisualEditor toolbar, if not alter the default theme.>>

gryllida wrote:

( Illustrations: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback&oldid=570246873#Toolbar_icons_style )

An example of how users might want to change the way they see VE:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:John_Broughton/common.css
(an easier way to set a background color for VE is being requested).

I'm entirely unsure what this is asking for. VE already inherits users' CSS, which lets people change the CSS as they see fit - as John Broughton's script shows.

Marking as "INVALID", but happy to re-open if people can explain what different from the above this is asking for.

gryllida wrote:

My original query was in making different styles available for an average user, who has no CSS experience.

gryllida wrote:

Elitre, please file a new bug, my query you pasted does not belong here.

Hey James,
I am reopening this to understand whether Gryllida's concerns can/should be addressed, and because the user understands, from the logs of a recent office hour, that you welcome feedback from users about this topic. Gryllida is asking for a set of themes for the Toolbar from which the user can choose the one he/she wants (and provided examples in comment #2).

Other users instead were hoping that graphic solutions that are now possible by changing one's CSS are made more easily accessible in VE itself. I for one am not really good at editing my CSS page, but I could easily check a box that lets me choose a different background color that makes it more obvious when I'm VEditing (and would gladly do so).

So there are probably 2 different requests here, and I can split them if one of them can be worked on.
Thanks :)

(In reply to comment #5)

My original query was in making different styles available for an average
user, who has no CSS experience.

Then that's a question for MediaWiki core, not VisualEditor; VisualEditor just inherits its styling from MediaWiki.

Certainly, we are not going to build a custom-styling tool just for VisualEditor when the rest of MediaWiki is designed to be consistent.

(In reply to comment #8)

[...] when the rest of MediaWiki is designed to be consistent.

:-)

gryllida wrote:

I understand you expect folks to either 1) look into having existing themes change the VisualEditor appearance to fit their style, or 2) to look into using CSS. As the latter is not user-friendly for non-technical users I will look into the former. Thank you.