Mac OS contrast settings
Some weeks ago I happened to looked at iTunes and noticed that the stripes, alternating between white and light blue, were gone. At first I thought that it was some kind of new visualization of Mac OS Tiger…
But after looking at some further applications it turned out that it definitely was a system wide effect. In a first step I checked color, contrast and brightness settings of my display as well as the color profiles in the “display” preference pane — nothing. Was there something wrong with my display? Was my display not properly connected to the graphics card?
Universal Access
After a while I figured out that the contrast slider in the “Universal Access” preference pane has been moved to the right, which caused the system to display all content with a slightly increased contrast. After setting the slider to its initial position everything looked perfect again. Wonderful.
Shortcut
Glad to see that my display still works perfectly, I tried to figure out how the settings could have been changed. It turned out that it was a keyboard shortcut which I haven’t been aware of so far: Cmd+Alt+Ctrl+, decreases the contrast whereas Cmd+Alt+Ctrl+. increases it. Somehow I must have pressed the latter one unwittingly several times. So if you experience similiar effects, make sure that you switch to your universal access preference pane and check the contrast slider in the lower part of the dialog.
