Re: GnomeURIEntry

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Wed, 2002-09-25 at 15:14, Bill Haneman wrote:

> > Would be ok for accessibility if TAB autocompleted and/or focused the
> > list of alternatives when it is present, like the post says?
> 
> My opinion is still that this would be a bad idea, since it would make
> tab-traversing the UI much more awkward, by requiring (at best)
> control-Tab to "get out" of a tab completion entry field.  

Actually I don't think this would be necessary.  In Mozilla, the first
press of Tab moves focus from the text field into the already-open
dropdown, and sets the textfield to that value.  At that point you can
either press Enter to accept the completion (possibly having used the
arrowkeys to navigate up/down the list to select a different one first),
or press Tab again.  If you do the latter, the text is "un-completed"
again, and I don't see any reason why focus couldn't just move onto the
next control in the chain-- although Mozilla actually just cycles focus
between the list of completions and the 'search for what you've just
typed' list item at this point.

So, doing it this way would add an extra control (the dropdown) into the
tab chain, but it wouldn't force the user to use Ctrl-Tab.  I think the
main issue then would be the subtle keynav differences between this and
a regular combo box, and how to resolve them-- but since there's a new
combo box control coming along soon, now would be a good time to try :)

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