Re: the keyboard accessibility capplet

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

In a pique of inefficency I'm just going to run through this thread and
reply to each email separately :)

On Wed, 2002-09-25 at 21:13, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> Maybe it's just me - here's what I think is wrong with it:
> 
>  - Having both a slider and a spinbutton for one setting makes the
>    whole thing look awful and 10x more confusing.

The HIG's take on this is:

"For large ranges of integers (more than about 20), and for ranges of
floating point numbers, consider providing a text box or spin box that
is linked to the slider's value. This allows the user to quickly set or
fine-tune the setting more easily than they could with the slider
control alone."

Whether or not we agree with this guideline, I think all the sliders in
our dialog currently fall into that category :)  It's possible there are
some parameters where this level of fine tuning isn't essential (e.g.
"disable if unused for") and a static readout of the value would
suffice, but I think it's probably important for those settings whose
values are of the order of milliseconds rather than seconds.

Certainly the spinboxes in the left-hand column are much wider by
default than they need to be; fixing that would probably help as well.

>  - the title of the window is inconsistent with other capplets 
>    ("Configuration" not "Preferences").

Agree, this needs fixing.

>  - the title says "AccessX" which is UNIX-workstation-cruft
>    terminology.

It does looks a little ugly, but 'accessx' is a long-standing and
well-understood term in the accessibility community.  Having it only
show up in the window title was a compromise; nobody looks in window
titles anyway :)  Perhaps this could go away after a few releases when
people have made the connection, but I guess we'll always be getting new
users from other desktops, hopefully!

>  - the "enable keyboard accessibility" checkbox is bad; most users
>    here will interpret it to mean "make my keyboard work" and wonder
>    why they would uncheck it.
> 
>    Also, there is no reason why you can't just check or uncheck the
>    four specific checkboxes (mouse keys, bounce keys, etc.) as you
>    have to do on Windows XP, especially given the need to trim the
>    size of this control panel. You don't need the save-myself-a-couple
>    clicks extra checkbox that has an unclear label.

This is a possibility I guess.  One problem you would get with doing it
this way is when the "turn off when unused for n seconds" feature kicked
in, there would be no quick way of turning it back on again.

Unfortunately the rationale for some of these features has been lost in
the mists of time-- they've been in AccessX for years. (Perhaps Earl can
remind us of some of them-- cc'ing him). We would definitely need to run
that sort of feature change past the accessibility community before we
could go ahead with it.

>  - putting a space before colons in labels is just wrong.

Yep, should be fixed.

>  - the "Import CDE AccessX file" button should be in a
>    Solaris-specific --enable-solaris-stuff compile option, and absent
>    otherwise. And probably does not belong in the dialog button box
>    anyway, it's not a dialog action.

It's not Solaris-specific; accessx is available on many platforms. 
Indeed I argued against the use of the word "CDE" on this button since
it's available on SGI, OpenWindows etc. as well, but Jody didn't agree
:)

Admittedly its current position was chosen pretty much to save space--
but loading an accessx file does potentially alter all the controls in
the dialog, so it's by no means completely wrong.

It definitely needs an ellipsis on the label though.  :)

>  - abbreviation "msecs" is not good.

I remember one of the docs team asking us to do this, although that
slightly confused me at the time as I thought their convention was to
use SI units.  Cc'ing them on this to see if they have an opinion.

>  - the mouse prefs are duplicated from the "Mouse" control panel, 
>    adding to the extra clutter.

There is no duplication, "Mouse Keys" allows you to move the mouse
pointer and emulate mouse buttons using the keypad, and is completely
unrelated to the behaviour of any conventional pointing device you have
connected to your computer.  If this distinction is unclear then we
maybe need to look at how to resolve it.

>  - the button to open the Keyboard capplet is bogus; if people want
>    Keyboard settings they go to Preferences->Keyboard. It would make
>    more sense to have an Accessibility button in the Keyboard control
>    panel, if anything.

There already is an Accessibility button in the Keyboard control panel. 
I agree that the two-way thing is unpleasant (particularly since GNOME
insists on spawning new instances of capplets every time you launch
one), but again we made this decision because users familiar with
AccessX know that they can change keyboard repeat and delay rates as
part of that.  Therefore if there was no way to do that from our
'accessx' dialog they may regard it as a missing feature.

Again, I'd be happy to revisit this one in conjunction with members of
the accessibility community.

(Also, I don't think putting the "Repeat Keys" button in a "Toggle and
Repeat Keys" frame is a great idea as the two functions are unrelated,
but at the time it was the most space-efficient option.  Better
suggestions welcome.)

>  - unless it was fixed recently, it still appears as the only item 
>    in its own submenu.

See earlier mails on this; basically we expect more capplets to appear
here in the not-too-distant future.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems