As discussed in
* {T72879}
* {T50946}
* {T26739}
Anything accessibility & usability, that is purely reading-related could be moved to a simple site-style menu, and thereby become available to logged-out users, too.
The skin-system is in the process of being overhauled, and hopefully more modular possibilities will arise from that. We should aim to: Provide sensible defaults, but make the fundamental settings easy to tweak. So that people who want (less clutter vs more metadata everywhere) or (basic design vs more complex-tools vs more styled design) or (etc...) can choose for themselves.
(Sidenote: The [[http://gpii.net/ |GPII.net]] (Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure) and connected projects seems to be aiming at this, at a global scale; see [[http://www.floeproject.org/prefsEditors.html| FLOE example video]] (2 min) and click "show display preferences" in the top-right of the window).
I included "Appearance" as well as "Accessibility", partially because they ''often'' overlap, and partially because FLOE and GPII do the same. I included line-spacing (formerly labelled "density") because it's the most prominent option in gmail; and because FLOE included it; and because it's a frequently discussed/divisive aspect of Flow. I also tried to include many of the visual elements that don't have subjective "right" answers, and that opinion is split on - but some more elements could/should be added such as "collapsible sidebar" for the left-hand (for LTR) site sidebar, which has been heavily discussed but noone can agree to change the default.
Relevant examples:
* NYTimes 3-level font-size options - ([[http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2014/01/20/public-editor/20publicfontsize2/20publicfontsize2-blog480.jpg |screenshot]])
* GMail's 3-level interface-density options - ([[http://opalcat.com/images/326.gif |screenshot]], [[http://gmailblog.blogspot.ca/2011/11/changing-information-density-in-gmails.html |details]])
* Battlefield's 3 color-blind options - ([[https://imgur.com/a/iBRGY/layout/horizontal#0 |4 screenshots]])
* Fixed-width experiments in Typography Refresh and Flow - Some users love this ([[https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Beta_Features#Fixed_textwidth|eg]]); Some like the idea but want to be able to change the default width; Some want (the current) full-width. We should make it changeable. One possibility is to make it "resizable", just like the editing-text-box currently is (which also has a hard-override in [[https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing|Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing|Preferences->editing]] for columns and rows). Maybe http://jqueryui.com/resizable/#snap-to-grid or similar?
* [[https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reference_Tooltips|Reference Tooltips]] has, and [[https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Hovercards|Hovercards]] will have, an opt-out for anons. Reference Tooltips has 2 additional settings (timing-delay, and hover/click to activate - [[https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Reference Tooltips options menu.png|screenshot]])