Re: Toolbar keyboard navigation (was: Toolbar Consistency Issues)

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Tue, 2003-02-18 at 14:29, Soeren Sandmann wrote:

> I spent some time this weekend looking at how to do keyboard
> navigation for GtkToolbar, and I think I now know how to do it. I hope
> to produce a patch next weekend.

This sounds great.  We probably need to make sure we're agreed on
exactly what the behaviour should be before you start though, I know
there have been one or two alternative suggestions since the original
spec was proposed.

>         - F10 cycles focus between all menubars and toolbars in a
>           window

This is probably the main point of discussion, I think.  Bill has
suggested it might be better for toolbars to be included in the regular
Tab chain for a window, and reserve F10 for menubars.  Owen (I think)
has suggested that even some controls on the toolbar be included the Tab
chain too.


>                - left/right arrow key should move focus to
>                  previous/next control
>                
>                - Home/End should move focus to first/last control in
>                  toolbar
>                
>                - (Perhaps) Ctrl+left/right to move to first control in
>                  previous/next group of controls?  (If so, should it
>                  be visual group or functional group?)
> 
>                - Post tooltip for focused control: Shift+F1 (see bug
>                  #53614)

I think these are still pretty sane.

>                - Activate toolbutton - Enter

Space should do this too, as that's the "do it" key that's documented in
the user guide.

Note also the comments on freedesktop.org today from a user who's
frustrated that clicking a toolbar button moves focus to the toolbar,
and that he has to click again in the document window to give focus back
to the document.  This could be a tricky issue to get around, one
solution (which might not even be technically feasible) might be to move
focus back to the document if the button was clicked by the mouse, but
not if it was activated by the keyboard.  I'm not sure how this would
apply to non-button toolbar controls, though, like combo boxes.

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