Re: Tabs and groups of radio buttons

["Padraig O'Briain" <Padraig Obriain sun com>]

Calum,

My experience is that Java does not do it this way. At least in the SwingSet2 
demo the radio buttons do not behave as you describe even when in a button 
group.

I am finding it difficult to come up with a clean way or even a dirty way of 
attempting to implement this. While you may think of a group of radio buttons as 
a single object they are not implemented that way. One might expect that all 
radio buttons in a radio button group would be in the same container and no 
other objects would be in that container this is not enforced.

Padraig

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> To: "Padraig O'Briain" <Padraig Obriain sun com>
> CC: gnome-accessibility-list gnome org
> Subject: Re: Tabs and groups of radio buttons
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> Padraig O'Briain wrote:
> 
> > In bug 53577 you propose that when any button in a group of mutually 
exclusive
> > radio buttons has focus, pressing Tab should move focus to the control
> > immediately after the last button in the group.
> > 
> > Is this use of Tab inconsistent with what is proposed elsewhere, i.e. Tab 
focus
> > the next control in the navigation sequence?
> 
> I don't believe so-- a group of radio buttons is conceptually the same
> as an option menu or a single-selection list, which you also tab into,
> use the arrow keys to make a selection, and tab out of again.  If you
> had Tab moving through each individual radio button in turn, we'd also
> have to change the proposed functionality where focusing a radio button
> also selects it, which I think would cause unnecessary extra effort for
> the keyboard user.
> 
> (Java and Windows also both see fit to implement it this way, IIRC, so
> it's probably not unreasonable).
> 
> Cheeri,
> Calum.
> 
> -- 
> CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
> mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
> http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771
> 
> Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems