Change Background color Theme Office 2013

The inability to change the theme background makes the 2013 products almost useless. I write for a living and spend half my time trying to figure out where the cursor is at on a page. As has been mentioned many times, Dark Gray does not create sufficient contrast. Whoever thought it a good idea to redesign this foundational aspect of the product needs to reassess their axioms. It needs to be fixed now.

Microsoft,

Research has shown that up to 15% of the general population has some kind of difficulty with light sensitive vision ranging from mild to extremely severe. A significant port of the population who suffer from migraines are light sensitive too and find it some difficulty with light, and reading text on computer screens on white / light coloured backgrounds. The exact needs differ from person to person. This problem is also often comorbid with other disabilities and medical conditions such as Visual Stress / Irlen Syndrome, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome / ME, Dyslexia, Autism, Dyspraxia, ADD, Lupus, and a bunch of others, where light sensitivite vision is an issue. Also there are folk without medical conditions who are suffer from various types of light sensitive vision.

The short of it is that we **need** to be able to customise the colours of our user interfaces for the software applications we use, to be able to use our computers in comfort and to be spared from splitting headaces and other negative side effects. For me personally, I need a black background with green text. The dark grey background setting for Outlook 2013 is way too bright and uncomfortable for me, and still gives me headaches (plus stops me from being able to read propertly). I need a black background. There is nothing dark about the so called dark grey setting in Outlook 2013. Please free up users of Outlook / Office 2013 to be able to select their own UI colours please. OpenOffice / LibreOffice does it well, so Microsoft, you certainly have more than adequate resources to do it even better.

Microsoft User Experience / User Interface designers, please please please get your act together regarding UI Accessiblity and let us choose our own UI colours (text, background, etc) in your Software User Interfaces (Office, Windows, etc.) . By forcing your restrictive colour schemes on us, you are putting up a major barrier for us being able to use your software in comfort and even worse, are causing negative health side effects like headaches and migraines by defaulting to bright blinding white backgrounds.

Glen

I just upgraded from 2010 to 2013 and it's the first time I've regretted upgrading.  I'm finding it very difficult to work in Outlook 2013, the colors are very hard on the eyes.  I don't really understand taking away functionality in an "upgrade".  As much as I dislike Webmail, I may end up having to use it.  I just don't think I can be productive in Outlook 2013. 

Would it really have been that difficult to have added other color options?  ....I would take anything that made it so that we could better distinguish from sections, right now everything runs together regardless of what "color" you choose.  I'm not liking it.

I join the disappointment voices fullheartedly: for many years I have bee used to very special color theme in Windows and especially in Word - grey-green background and dark brown font. It became really important to me. I would never buy Word 2013 if I knew its color limitations. And indeed I tried to buy Word 2003, 2007 or 2010 for Windows 8.1 but couldn't find any. Feel very dissappointed, used. Feels that Microsoft cares about business, but but not about me.