Syntax highlighting is good overall, the best is having some sane defaults and the IDE/environment allowing the user to make tweaks to it. I personally don't like dark schemes and prefer the white backgrounds now.

I never thought of the color blind side of it till I read Finnucane's point, but the ability to tweak the colors mostly would solve that I guess.

I also really like that most editors are starting to highlight local, global, class members/parameters/variables all subtly different. It makes identifying them even easier. However, having that type of highlighting doesn't remove the need for good naming (and coding) standards to make it easy to distinguish proper scope etc.