Re: the keyboard accessibility capplet

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

I basically agree with all Havoc's comments here....

Further:

   - ungrammatical labels (e.g. "Beep when key is rejected"). This is a
general problem that seems to occur again and again in computer
interfaces. Its silly to try and abbreviate by dropping "a", "the" and
other "redundant" words. They aren't redundant insomuch as they're
expected by your users.... There are lots of other places in the world
where space is at a premium, and in essentially none of them where the
result is intended for processing by other people do you see truncations
like this.

   - Given how many categories are in this capplet I would recommend
either tabs or, at the very least, using the new frame style which will
reduce a substantial amount of "noise" introduced by the frame borders
themselves. Using tabs would leave space to provide better labels that
better describe what these things are. It would be a shame if you had to
be already very familiar with accesibility to get the benefits of these
things. We don't expect users to have lots of experience to do things
like change the background etc, and I don't really see how accesibility
is different (especially if you want to pick up the hoardes of people
who could use accesibility but aren't so heavily disabled they require
it.... which I assume people do given how oft I've heard the "1/3 need
accesibility"... or whatever that figure is.

   - I find 10 hits for "AccessX" on Google. I find over 2,000 for
"Keyboard Accesibility". Unscientific... but its hard for me to imagine
AccessX being a standard word AND only garnering 10 hits. Its a nasty
undescriptive word, and given how little it seems to be used, is a prime
candidate for "dropping" in favour of a better word.

   - Placing checkboxes in frame labels is a non-standard control use
and further seems weird (at least to me).

   - Sun may want to customize this dialogue for migrating from CDE, but
most of the systems GNOME is still installed on have never and will
never have CDE on them. Having a special button for importing the CDE
AccessX file seems wrong. Additionally, I agree with Havoc that if the
dialogue were cleaner and easier to use it would be much less of an
issue. Navigating and finding a file to import is as difficult an
operation, I suspect, as checking a few boxes and moving a slider which
is all I can imagine somebody would need to do to be at least
*moderately* useful on the keyboard, enough so that making other tweaks
to keyboard accesibility wouldn't be a severe penalty.

-Seth

On Wed, 2002-09-25 at 13:13, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I know everyone is tired of hearing about it, but sadly that doesn't
> mean the problem is fixed. I complained about this before 2.0, but had
> to give up so we could ship - now that we're unfrozen again, it's time
> to bring it back up. ;-)
> 
> The problem: the Keyboard Accessibility Configuration dialog still
> needs major love, despite a few rewrites.
> 
> 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 title of the window is inconsistent with other capplets 
>    ("Configuration" not "Preferences").
> 
>  - the title says "AccessX" which is UNIX-workstation-cruft
>    terminology.
> 
>  - 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.
> 
>  - putting a space before colons in labels is just wrong.
> 
>  - 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.
> 
>  - abbreviation "msecs" is not good.
> 
>  - the mouse prefs are duplicated from the "Mouse" control panel, 
>    adding to the extra clutter.
> 
>  - 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.
> 
>  - unless it was fixed recently, it still appears as the only item 
>    in its own submenu.
> 
> So this thing is twice as big and confusing as it needs to be, due to
> extra sliders/spinbuttons, extra buttons in general, duplication of
> mouse capplet; and it adds a whole submenu to the Preferences menu.
> 
> I don't know if I have the right answer to all the problems, but can
> we _at least_ lose the slider/spinbutton stuff, and the AccessX stuff,
> and the extra one-item submenu?
> 
> Havoc
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