RE: Is keynav to unavailable menu items a bug?

["Jamal Mazrui" <Jamal Mazrui fcc gov>]

In general, I agree that I would rather know something is unavailable as
I'm navigating focus rather than skip it, since that tells me
information about the state of the application, e.g., when Control+C is
unavailable from the edit menu, no text is currently selected.  Also
supporting this point, tutorials I've read on Microsoft Office have
universally criticized the "personalized menus" setting where menu items
do not appear if they have not been recently used.

I suppose that if a small percentage of focusable items were available
in a particular situation and the time to navigate to available ones is
significant, then an efficiency argument for skipping unavailable items
deserves consideration.  It would be better interface design, however,
if the user had to press different keys or activate a different mode to
skip unavailable items, so that a different form of navigation is being
consciously done.

Regards,
Jamal




-----Original Message-----
From: mozilla-accessibility-admin mozilla org
[mailto:mozilla-accessibility-admin mozilla org] On Behalf Of Mary Otten
Sent: Monday, October 18, 2004 10:50 PM
To: gnome-accessibility-list gnome org;
mozilla-accessibility mozilla org
Subject: Re: Is keynav to unavailable menu items a bug?


Peter,
I would not say that key nav to unavailable menu items is a bug. It
might be different from what is expected in the Gnome environment. But I
don't see how it can be called a "bug". To me, a "bug" is something that
is 
"broken", doesn't work, causes a crash, whatever. This is just different
behavior. Indeed, I would find it not at all natural to have those
unavailable nav items skipped. I'd rather be told they're unavailable
than have 
them automatically skipped. If that "feature" isn't explained very
prominently in the documentation for  gnome, I should think your
gnopernicus users would be fairly confused at first, because menus would
look 
different, depending on what was available. that would take some time to
figure out, and while figuring, somebody might well think that their
program or their computer or perhaps their screen reader was
experiencing a 
problem.


Mary Otten
TecAccess
Senior Q/A Accessibility Tester
maryotten earthlink net


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