Thank You! I started fiddling with Accessibility settings to improve the readability of the grays, but must have hit something that changed colors, and got some psychedelic colors that were almost painful to look at. It was late and I searched web sources – including Apple Support – for ways to reset colors. None of them mentioned the Reset Color button, which I must have missed last night, but when I tried it this morning the psychedelic effect went away. I reminds me that I shouldn’t try to fix things when I’m too tired and annoyed to tackle problems with my brain properly in gear.
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Oh, that’s puce. I guess we’re on our own a lot of the time when dealing with the color and appearance entanglements that are possible. Glad you climbed out of the quagmire.
Yours 'til you never need to,
L. Lee
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And you never can be sure all the bugs are squashed until you look everywhere. The colors you can use to “flag” files in Apple Mail, and in the Finder are now all rather murky and hard to distinguish. Yellow, for example, now looks brown, and everything else is mud mixed with the intended color. I’ll have to deal with that later; for now, I have work to be done.
Sigh…
I just checked and it looks like the colors that are still hosed are under Appearance rather than accessibility. Here’s what they look like not
There must be some way of controlling that, but I can’t find it yet.
I found a solution to the problem. I knew I had been fiddling with preferences and that the change had occurred in the past couple of days, so I went and checked Time Machine to see if it saves Preferences in the user Library file. It did, so I went back a few days and recovered the contents of the Preferences from a few days ago, and restarted. The colors are now back to normal. Checking the preferences and recovering them from Time Machine took maybe 20 minutes overall. I would recommend that as a simple thing to try for munged preferences if you have Time Machine data from when your preferences were okay.
Apple Support was not much help. I tried chatting with them yesterday, and they went through several things for maybe 45 minutes without getting anywhere. At that point they wanted me to connect my MacMini to another display to test if the (Dell) display was the problem, and then upgrade to Sonora. I had to go out, so they suspended it. After that runaround I decided to try recovering the old preferences from Time Machine, as described above, which saved a lot of trouble.
I’m glad you found a way to reset it. I think maybe Apple supporters are trained not to go too deep into personal preferences, because we users change our minds a lot.
It strikes me there are far too many preferences, it’s entirely too easy to bungle using them, and it would make users lives easier of more preferences had a “RESET” button like the RESET COLORS in Accessibility/Display. And I suspect you’re right that Apple trains their support folks not to delve much into preferences. This one seemed more interesting into getting me to upgrade to Sorona, perhaps so they could use the diagnostics they have been trained on.
And the choices in the menus, with branches and long lists, are very confusing. For some reason my dad, who uses computers but does not understand them, kept calling me to say that his email only had spam in it. I assumed that he had clicked on the folder, but trying to describe how to fix it without seeing what he is seeing is frustrating. I eventually found the Comand-1 keystroke that would take him to his inbox if he was in Mail, but I looked through the menus for a long time before finding something that may work. And the fact that the keystrokes are light (which in the past would indicate that the selection was not able to be used in a certain area) only made things more confusing.
I am working on screen sharing, but his Spectrum router is blocking it, and trying to find a family member or tech person to address that is near impossible. Sorry, end of rant.
Once I get access, I plan to increase his default font size and increase the contrast to help him see things better.
How many people use computers and understand them? Not me. (I supported Macs at a university for 20 years.) Until you get the router port forwarding fixed, maybe video conferencing like FaceTime on a smart phone or even just sharing a static video from a phone might help. Hope finding ways to help won’t open a whole new can of worms.
Looking at getting the cheapest configuration that can use that MacOS, probably an iMac Late 2013. I can get one from MacSales pretty cheap. May be easier to do that than fiddle around.