Multiple Colours in IMs and Local Chat

I have some minor visual impairments and have considerable difficulty in separating text in local chats and IMs, so that it all tends to become one great chunk. It helps having a different colour for IMs, char and objects, but when there's a lot of AVs typing away who's saying what can get lost very easily for me.

What would be useful to me is a way of colouring these in real time, so that I could consecutive blocks of text were differently coloured.

I'm not sure the best way to go about this. I guess that it might work by either assigning a colour to a particular AV (which I guess would need a list of those assignments somewhere) or by maybe setting up a list of chat/IM colours so that the colours used would just cycle through that set.

The first option might take up a lot of space. Maybe it would be something you'd set on the "Notes" tab of a profile for someone else (with the default being the colours set in one's preferences. The second option would take up less space over all perhaps, as it would include extra colour boxes that you'd set in your profile.

I hope this is a reasonable suggestion. SL is great to use, but sometimes it can become inadvertently confusing.

Would more spacing between each avie's chat help any?

In case it's not entirely clear: just like you wrote your post in paragraphs you could have an empty line (or half of one) in between each avie's text so create distinct visual "blocks" of text.

Just offering that alternative because it would be a lot easier to implement instead of per-avie text colouring and the easier things are the more likely it can be to ever actually get implemented .

Actually, having an extra gap between text posts would make a great deal of difference!

If you're going to do that, then may I suggest having a number field in preferences to specify just how many lines they are spaced. The default would be zero. This might allow for fractions (e.g. 1.5 lines) so that the user could please themselves and tweak it to the best possible result.

I like both ideas.

I think the extra (configurable) line spacing between chatters is great for accessibility.

But I would also love to be able to manually assign a custom colour to some of my friends, so that my SO's chat and IM always appeared in pink (for example), while my close friends were all in blue, or whatever.