Re: A universally designed GUI interface

[phoenixl <phoenixl sonic net>]

Hi, Rodd

The main problem is that as I understand it the event handling is
different between IE and Mozilla.  I think that at one point IE returned
a wider range of keystrokes.  That may have all changed recently with
various versions being released.  Perhaps someone can point me to the
most recent information in Javascript event handling for Mozilla.  The
keyboard event handling is table driven so I can quickly build
alternative key event tables.

Maybe I should mention a little bit about the design of the interface.
I'm basically an HCI person and much of my work has been in UNIX.  (I
developed various pieces of graphics software at Berkeley when BSD was
being worked on.)  Like many people in HCI, I tend to design using the
user-centered approach.  Rather than concentrating on GUI's, I was
thinking about an audio-only computer with a keyboard and no screen.  My
idea was what kind of interface for this type of computer would let
people work with as much ease of use, efficiency and accuracy as
possible.  (We HCI people get hung up on that stuff.  <smile>)  After
coming up with some ideas, I then thought about how they could be
integrated into GUI's so that visually impaired people could be at their
optimum when using computers.  However, being user-centered in my
analyses, I wanted to get as much feed-back in the design as possible
from a wide variety of users.  The reality of the world is that the
program that many people use which would allow me to do a reasonable
simulation was IE.  Also, I could write the whole thing (about 2K of
lines) in about three days.  That way if I had made some very foolish
design decisions, I wouldn't have wasted very much development time.

So far, the feedback from the visually impaired world has been quite
positive.  However, I'm very interested in getting as much negative
feedback as possible early as possible so I can find out any design
flaws and get them addressed.

Thanks very much for your interest.

Scott


> I'd love to look at this, but I (as most of the people on this list will
> be) use Gnome on Linux and as such don't have access to Internet
> Explorer (or even possible want access to it).
> 
> I do however wonder why, if you're using JavaScript, this doesn't work
> on Mozilla or even Netscape?
> 
> 
> Rodd