Would like a version of the -print-colors option for colourblind users

[zoltan-dulac]

I find this application incredibly useful. Thanks for your efforts!

The -print-colors option is great, but its difficult or impossible for colourblind users to perceive the information. I would like to ask if we can implement it using bold, italic and underlined characters along with the colours. A explanation at the beginning of the output denoting what each color or font-style means at the beginning would be useful as well.

Let me know your thoughts. Would love to see this feature implemented.

[danbev]

I believe the current color scheme is supposed to be colorblind friendly but I'm not very knowledgeable in this area so if this could be improved then I'd like to hear more 👍

I think adding a description about the color scheme would be nice to have, and I've opened #3141 as a suggestion.

[zoltan-dulac]

In the document you linked to, it mentions "In the much rarer monochrome vision, all working colour receptors are the same or missing and only brightness variations are seen". This is why WCAG 1.4.1: Use of Color exists (WCAG are the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, but they are used for other non-web digital accessibility as well). The guideline states that "Color is not the only way of distinguishing information". This is not to say that colour cannot be used, but it should be complimented by another visual indication.

This is the reason I suggested using other font-styling to do this, such as bolding, underlining and italicizing. We could implement this in --print-colors, or have an alternative, maybe --print-confidence (I believe this is a bit more meaningful to users since this is what the output is supposed to represent: the confidence that the transcribing of whisper.cpp is correct)

From what I understand, the top font-stylings supported by terminals today is bold, underline and inverse (italic is not as well supported as I thought).

Let me know if this makes sense. As a digital accessibilty specialist who uses this tool all the time, I know this would be a great feature to add to ensure colourblind users who use this command line tool can understand the output.

[danbev]

Let me know if this makes sense.

That makes perfect sense to me and thanks for the background information on this. And --print-confidence sounds like a good command line option as well. Would you like (have time) to implement this? I've put together a suggestion for this which can be iterated on and hopefully be useful as a starting point.

[zoltan-dulac]

I would love to do this. I am at a conference this week, but I will definitely look at this in the next few days. I am really looking forward to helping out here.

[danbev]

Closing this as we have added initial support in #3150. But feel free to open pull request(s) with improvements.