Re: the keyboard accessibility capplet

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

Hi folks:

Following Havoc's suggestion that the XP accessibility capplet was
somehow better than the GNOME-2 capplet, I really got curious about
testing my own, quite different opinion.  I picked out a task that I
though was a reasonably representative task for users, specifically that
of 'adjusting' the keyboard acceptance delay (called the "SlowKeys
delay" in AccessX parlance.)  I picked this task more-or-less at random,
though my impression from trying the XP dialog for awhile is that most
end-user tasks (other than simple toggles of an AccessX feature "on" or
"off") would yield comparable results.

Keystroke conservation is important to AccessX users; I found that XP
required more than twice as many keystrokes to accomplish the task as
GNOME-2, for both the case where mnemonics are used, and the case where
"TAB"-style keyboard navigation is used.  In this case XP opened four
simultaneous dialogs during the task, whereas GNOME only used one.

As I noted elsewhere, the XP accessibility dialogs have other problems
as well, for instance they don't respect High-contrast and large-print
system settings (!).  The one thing that I do think the XP dialogs have
going for them is that they are not as "cluttered" as ours, which I
think is what Havoc was feeling.  However when one takes into account
four simultaneous dialogs it's not clear to me that the overall clutter
factor is lower, and if simplification requires either loss of important
features or doubles the number of required keystrokes for end-user
tasks, then I think the tradeoff is not worth it.  Also note that I
picked a seemingly-reasonable-though-short SlowKeys value of "0.2"
seconds, and discovered that XP doesn't support values between 0.3 and
0.0 seconds!

I include a step-by-step description of the task on both OS'es inline,
below.

regards,

Bill

=============================================================

Task: set 'SlowKeys' key acceptance rate to 0.2 sec (200 ms), from the
	default setting.

Results:

ratio of keystrokes, using mnemonics: XP/GNOME-2: 11/4
ratio of keystrokes, without mnemonics: XP/GNOME-2: 18/8

ratio of open dialogs: XP/GNOME 4/1

========= Details: =======

On GNOME-2
in summary:

* select Applications->Desktop Preferences->Accessibility->Keyboard
  via mouse or keyboard (i.e. Alt-F10, arrow keys, spacebar)
('Keyboard Accessibility' capplet dialog appears)

THEN:

* TAB to slider (i.e. press TAB 6 times)
* press and hold left-arrow until "200" appears in field
* press Esc
('Keyboard Accessibility' capplet dialog disappears)

OR 

* TAB to entry field (i.e. press TAB 7 times)
* press '2', '0', '0'
* press Esc
('Keyboard Accessibility' capplet dialog disappears)


On XP:

* Start->Control Panel (Windows key, arrow keys, then Enter)
(control panel dialog opens)
* Select "Accessibility" (arrow keys, press Spacebar then Enter)

(dialog 'Accessibility Options' appears)
* TAB to FilterKeys->Settings (i.e. press TAB 3 times)
* press spacebar
(dialog 'Settings for FilterKeys' appears)
* TAB to Filter options->Settings (i.e. press TAB 3 times + spacebar)
('Advanced Settings for FilterKeys' dialog appears)
* TAB to SlowKeys combobox (i.e. press TAB 3 times)
* press uparrow three times to select '0.3 seconds' (0.2 seconds is not
an available choice, closest choices are 0.0 and 0.3)
* press Eec
('Advanced Settings for FilterKeys' dialog disappears)
* press Esc
('Settings for FilterKeys' dialog disappears)
* press Esc
('Accessibility Options' dialog disappears)
* press Esc
(control panel dialog disappears)

keysequence: 
tab-tab-tab-space-tab-tab-tab-space-tab-tab-tab-up-up-up-esc-esc-esc-esc

===========

Using mnemonics:

GNOME-2:
...
('Keyboard Accessibility' dialog appears)
* press Alt-o
* press and hold down-arrow
* press Esc
('Keyboard Accessibility' dialog disappears)

keysequence:
Alt-o-down-esc
(or Alt-o-2-0-0-esc)

XP:
...
(dialog 'Accessibility Options' appears)
* Alt-e
(dialog 'Settings for FilterKeys' appears)
* Alt-e
('Advanced Settings for FilterKeys' dialog appears)
* press uparrow three times to select '0.3 seconds' (0.2 seconds is not
an available choice, closest choices are 0.0 and 0.3)
* press Eec
('Advanced Settings for FilterKeys' dialog disappears)
* press Esc
('Settings for FilterKeys' dialog disappears)
* press Esc
('Accessibility Options' dialog disappears)
* press Esc
(control panel dialog disappears)
 
keysequence: Alt-e-Alt-e-up-up-up-esc-esc-esc-esc


==============================================