A farmOS user emailed me with a question about accessibility, so I am posting my response publicly (with their permission) in case it is helpful to others in the future.
Original question:
I have some vision issues and I am wondering if the program has different themes in other colours.
Response:
Great questions! First, regarding different themes/colors: yes there may be some options that would help!
For context: farmOS uses a theme called Gin, which is another free and open source software project. We lean heavily on the design decisions and options made by the upstream maintainers of Gin. The benefit of this is that we (the farmOS maintainers) can focus our limited resources on farming-specific features, while the maintainers of Gin can focus on making a usable and accessible admin theme for Drupal (which farmOS is built on). The disadvantage, of course, is that we only have the options that Gin provides. So I would suggest looking at what’s available currently and hopefully it works for you. If not, the next step would be to bring it to the attention of the Gin maintainers - so that they can improve their theme for everyone who uses it (including farmOS).
Gin provides “theme override options” for each user in farmOS, so you can customize the experience for yourself, without affecting other users. To see the available options, click on your username in the top right, then click on the “Edit” tab. Scroll down to the bottom and check the “Enable overrides” box. You will see a number of different options, including color customization and “Increase contrast”.
Please note that we (the farmOS maintainers) have not tested many of these ourselves with farmOS, so it is possible that there are unintended effects of changing things that we aren’t aware of. If you run into any problems, please feel free to report them to us and we’ll figure out if it’s an issue with farmOS or an issue with Gin upstream.
As you are probably aware, both farmOS and Gin are open source projects maintained by volunteers, so there’s no guarantee that new feature requests or bug reports will be worked on in a timely manner. Again, the costs/benefits of open source… you (don’t) get what you (don’t) pay for - but over time as volunteers or sponsors contribute to the projects, everyone gets the benefits of the shared effort.
Some good and relevant news worth mentioning here: it has been decided that Gin will be merged into Drupal core version 11.3!
https://www.drupal.org/about/core/blog/drupal-core-will-adopt-gin-admin-theme-to-replace-claro
This is good because it means: 1) more users of Gin overall, which means even more diversity of people with different needs testing it and finding bugs, and 2) more dedicated efforts towards priorities like accessibility, which Drupal core takes very seriously (https://www.drupal.org/about/features/accessibility).