Chrome Story

Chrome OS will soon get an option to change cursor color. This feature will be introduced as an accessibility feature for Chromebooks.

Update: This feature is now available in the Canary version of Chrome OS.

How to Change Chromebook Cursor Color

To change Chromebook cursor color, you should first enable the the following flag:

“Enable cursor colors: Enable experimental feature which allows setting cursor color in Accessibility settings.”

Restart your Chromebook, and now we are ready to change the cursor color.

1. Open the Settings app.
2. Click Advanced and then Accessibility.
3. Click Manage accessibility features.
4. Under Mouse and touchpad, enable Custom cursor color.
5. You will now see a new dropdown named “Color”. Select the new cursor color from this dropdown.

Change Cursor Color Flag

The black and white cursor color may not be the best option for all users. As the bug created for this feature says, some users may find the standard black/white cursors harder to see.

Chrome OS is getting ready to fix this by giving users an option to customize the cursor color. According the code change we spotted in the Chromium code repository, this will be added as an experimental feature flag soon.

“Enable cursor colors: Enable experimental feature which allows setting cursor color in Accessibility settings.”

As the flag suggests, this is an accessibility feature intended for users who might find it hard to use the current black and white cursor.

Explaining how this is implemented, the bug notes:

“Adds the ability to recolor cursors when cursor compositing is enabled. This transforms greyscale and black pixels in the cursor to a custom color, without impacting white, fully transparent, or color-tinted pixels. That allows us to set a custom color for the black parts of cursors without creating new assets.”

It might take a while for this feature to be available for all the users. We shall update this article when custom cursor colors feature becomes available in Chrome OS for everyone to test.

Stay tuned for more updates.

Source: Gerrit.