AccessibilityIcons
Ubuntu should be accessible to everybody. Also the visually impaired. The current state of the gnome-accessibility-themes package is not acceptable.
You will see that some menu entries and applications are fairly complete, while others only partially so. [http://people.ubuntu.com/~henrik/images/contrast-icons.png This image] shows openoffice, which is the worst offender not using any high contrast icons at all, behind gedit which is complete. There is a bug filed against OpenOffice on this [https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/openoffice.org2-amd64/+bug/27191 here].
The Ubuntu artwork team should help better this situation. Install the gnome-accessibility-themes package and get to work!
Resources
Jakub Steiners original high contrast theme with svgs :http://jimmac.musichall.cz/stuff/high-contrast.tar.bz2. Jakub recommends a 48x48 target size.
Also by Jakub Steiner - a small howto on designing high contrast icons. Might be a good base for some style guidelines: http://jimmac.musichall.cz/doc/high-contrast/html/index.xhtml
Testing
In his icon guide Jakub recomends the icons be tested by bluring them. This is an example a 15px Gassian blur was applied to an image from the icon development page:
attachment:blur.png
And here the image was made gray scale and then blured:
attachment:desaturate+blur.png
Responsible
None yet.