Accessibility issue: TERM variable is ignored, or: How to turn off console colors on Linux?

[psychotux]

Ubuntu version: All

Console coloring makes hard to impossible for vision-impaired people to use Ubuntu:
Well, we all know that the programmers back then a third of a century ago found it totally cool that they, now no longer on serial terminal’s black/white, but on VGA now, could make boring text more colorful.
They did a lot of things to circumvent TERM restrictions… no idea whether TERMCAP on Linux is being used anymore at all …

In short, this mess of colors not only confuses and distracts, but also makes sometimes practically impossible to read text, depending on color background (I need green for best work endurance).

So, does there exist any possibility, accessibility setting or the like, on Ubuntu to force the console to VT100 or anything monochrome else ?

[ogra]

have you tried setting TERM=xterm-mono in your ~/.profile (and perhaps also unset LS_COLORS) ?

[hdd-gehrke]

Unsetting LS_COLORS is not enough. If this variable is not set ‘ls’ uses its default colors (which are exactly the colors set in LS_COLORS by default …). You have to change an alias for ‘ls’ defined in ~/.bashrc. It sets ‘ls’ to be ‘ls --color=auto’. Change that to ‘ls --color=never’ (and while you’re at it, there are similar aliases for grep/egrep/fgrep in there …).

[ogra]

@hdd-gehrke

It sets ‘ls’ to be ‘ls --color=auto’.

Oh, right, I forgot about that one …