Gmail grey on grey and visual accessibility

[tonycollinet]

Mum is using Gmail, and with weakening vision is finding the grey on grey colour scheme a problem. I thought the "high contrast" theme would help, but it only gives high contrast in the areas that don't matter. The main part of the screen is still grey on grey. In fact it seems to me to be worse than the standard "light" theme.

Anyone found a way to force it to show black/white for the whole page, including the thread thin lines that mark different areas of the page.

Thanks.

[rusky]

The dark theme shows black & white in the inbox if that's what you're after.

[Biggsy]

Or install Thunderbird for her - much cleaner display altogether, any size fonts, compatible with Gmail accounts.  If my mum can use it, yours can too. 

[Kim]

Yes, I'd suggest that a proper mail client on an accessible local system is going to be a far better approach, as the visual interface isn't at the whim of some web designer.

[tonycollinet]

How do you find thunderbird copes with Google labels. For me it interprets them as folders, but an email can have multiple labels. Does thunderbird see "copies" of the mails?

[Kim]

Not a clue.  Because of my preference for proper mail clients, I have no real need to use gmail, other than for keeping up to date with what older people with the same name as me are doing.

[Biggsy]

What are labels?

[fuaran]

Gmail is a bit weird with how it works with IMAP. But it usually works fine, once you've have figured it out.
Basically, yes labels on Gmail will appear as folders on Thunderbird (or another IMAP email client). So if a message has several labels, then it will appear in several different folders. And deleting a message from a folder will just remove that label, the message will still exist in other folders. Plus it has an "All Mail" folder, which contains all messages, whether they have labels or not.

These pages have some details, and recommended settings (I think recent versions of Thunderbird will set these automatically):
https://support.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/kb/thunderbird-and-gmail
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/77657
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/78892