Provide option for picker to use CSS color defined on hover with web page picks

[lloydi]

OK, this may be damn near impossible, but I'll throw it in regardless.

One of the biggest problems I find when using the colour picker to assess the text colour, while auditing a website, is that when the font size is small you have to be very very precise to pick the darkest part of the letter in order to get an accurate reading. But often, because of the way the fonts are rendered, that reading is still not quite accurate. One technique that I have used to get around this problem is to temporarily zoom the page to an extremely large size, and then pick the colour from the font, and then reset the page size.

Now, if there were an option to hold down a modifier key whilst doing the pick, for example holding down the option key, if the item directly underneath the picker at the time is in a webpage, would it be possible to interrogate that element and identify what the CSS colour attribute is? Thus, if you are trying to pick from a 10 pixel font size, and are not getting an accurate reading using the colour picker, then it could offer up the programmatically determined CSS value instead.

Mission:Impossible?

[superhighfives]

Hey @lloydi! Thanks for the suggestion. Currently Pika only has access to the onscreen colours, through the https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appkit/nscolorsampler API. In terms of your use case, a browser extension should have access to the DOM of the website itself, which would allow it to grab the exact colours from the CSS. Chrome's DevTools has ways of doing this, but the UI is a little tricky if you haven't used it before.

I'd love to be able to have that level of granular control for colour picking—knowing what's beneath the cursor, and reacting accordingly—but unfortunately it's currently out of scope with the API I'm using.

Going to close this one, but again, really appreciate the suggestion!

[lloydi]

Oh yeah, I'm completely familiar with the various dev tools implementations of this .... but your app is so nice, that I wanted to have that capability in there too :D

The reason for wanting it is that sometimes the browser tools are not able to identify the contrast issues. If they don't flag it as an issue, you can't use the tools to adjust the color to meet the WCAG pass level (which is a pain). Then it's down to using the external color picker app to do the necessary :)

I knew this was a long-shot, but always worth asking just in case.

[superhighfives]

Yeah, I'd love to have more granularity generally. The NSColorSampler API seems really minimal, though, and rolling my own would mean that every who downloads it needs to enable Screen Recording, which is an awkward process. But it does mean there's no way to address #8, or to allow moving the sampler via the keyboard for #28. Fingers crossed the API gets expanded safely in future.