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In this post CorrinaB presents a mapping to Windows System colors.

Accessibility is important to consider when designing applications. Not only do those with visual, physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological disabilities benefit from software that is accessible, but those without these disabilities benefit as well. Silverlight makes it possible to create applications that address accessibility needs, and some colleagues of mine and I decided to explore some of the possibilities by creating a control and navigation template theme that maps to Windows system colors (this will allow the application to seamlessly respond to Windows high contrast mode color changes).

With Silverlight 3, we now have access to system colors. If you need your new application to visually fit into the operating system it’s running on, simply inspect one of the static properties, provided by the new SystemColors class – System.HighlightColor for example, will tell you what color is used for highlighting the selection in ListBoxes.

Mike Taulty has dedictaed a post to one of the new classes of Silverlight 3 - the SystemColors.

Now, the SystemColors class is nice but it just has a bunch of static properties on it and nor is there any kind of change notification present when the user changes them.

So…I figure it’s not a major loss if the user has to refresh the browser (or perhaps click a Silverlight UI button) to tell the Silverlight application that they have changed their theme. It’s liveable.

With that in mind, I set about exposing some of those static properties on SystemColors as non-static properties so that they can be used from XAML.

Silverlight 3 now supports operating system colors. This means, that now Silverlight 3 applications could be adopted for users who use high-contrast color schemes.