In a previous post, I showed an ugly form. Ugly, because it looked awful when I ran the form with the Windows High Contrast Theme.

With the High Contrast Theme, normal black text appears yellow. Which is no problem at all when the text is drawn on a black background. But in my form, the text was drawn over a white shape control, and looked like this (the red arrows point to the yellow text):

So now I have a form that is unreadable in High Contrast. What I want to do is force Windows to draw the text black (since it is drawn over the white background).

 

There’s An Easy Fix For That!

This is simple to do. I set the ForeColor of the labels that I want to appear as black to RGB(2,2,2). This color change from RGB(0,0,0) is imperceptible to the human eye (it still looks black), but Windows sees it as an absolute color. And since I have changed it to something other than the default, Windows will display the label in my “near-black” color (since it is not the “Default”).

After my session at Southwest Fox, a couple of people said they do the same thing I do to force a label to be black, but they use RGB(1,1,1). Not sure why I picked 2,2,2 – but they’re both “black” to the naked eye — and either setting works fine.

Here’s an example of an instance of my “near-black” label on a form (the top label ForeColor is RGB(0,0,0) – the Default), while the label inside the white shape has a ForeColor of RGB(2,2,2) – or, as I like to call it, “forced black”:

And the same form, this time running in Windows High Contrast Theme:

Later in the series, we’ll look at creating sub-classes for different controls. This one I’ll call the lblForceBlack control, subclassed from a base Label class.