Re: the keyboard accessibility capplet

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Wed, 2002-09-25 at 22:22, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> I guess I don't get it at all; which is more likely:
> 
>  - user uses gnome for first time, opens keyboard capplet, sees
>    "Import AccessX," knows what it means and where to find the old
>    file, copies this file from their old UNIX workstation, imports it
> 
>  - user uses gnome for first time, opens keyboard capplet, and already
>    having the capplet open takes the tiny amount of time required to
>    just change the settings in-place

The problem isn't so much changing them, but knowing what to change them
to.  Chances are they might have been set up by a sysadmin or other
mentor, or you might just have been using your previous desktop for so
long that you'd forgotten what settings you were using.  Sure you could
log out of GNOME, log back into your old desktop and write them down (or
have someone write them down for you), but wouldn't that be a pain!

I agree that the button is probably over-prominent for what is at most a
one-off operation, though.  It may indeed be better if we just checked
for the existence of a ~/AccessX file the first time the user opened the
dialog, and ask them if they wanted to use those settings.  (Perhaps in
conjunction with a command line option to
gnome-accessibility-keyboard-properties should they wish to import later
or from a different file?)

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