Re: the keyboard accessibility capplet

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Thu, 2002-09-26 at 03:18, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> Microsoft has oceans of accessibility experts and has done major
> accessibility work in Windows XP, and their accessibility dialog has
> similar features to ours but presented in a better way.

Well, it's cleaner at the top level, but it forces you through a bunch
of nested dialogs instead.  Maybe that looks nicer, but I'm pretty sure
it doesn't save you any keystrokes.  (It would actually be interesting
to do a GOMS keystroke-model comparison if anybody's into that sort of
thing...)

Actually I completely lose faith in Microsoft's accessibility work every
time I choose one of their high contrast or large print themes-- you'd
be amazed just how how many icons don't change (well, none of them do,
really), fonts don't get bigger etc.  I'm not one to make wild claims,
but I think we'll be way ahead of them in the forseeable future, on that
front at least.

> I believe we can do better.

I do too.  Then again, I've never seen a GUI that couldn't be done
better :)

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