Re: keynav issues

[Calum Benson <calum benson ireland sun com>]

Havoc Pennington wrote:

> Some issues that will probably come up trying to get keynav right,
> some of these no doubt involve API changes and/or feature creep.
> 
> Calum's document: http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/keyboardnav.html

Incidentally, I'm just revising this doc at the moment further to
another few comments I received, so expect an updated version in the
next day or two.

>  - In message boxes, simply the mnemonic letter (without Alt) should
>    work to activate buttons.

One of the suggestions I'm noting in the latest draft is that this
should be generalised to work for any control in dialogs that don't
include any widgets that are sensitive to alphanumeric input (i.e.
dialogs that don't include text fields or tree/list-derived widgets). 
I'm not convinced that this set of dialogs is big enough to make it
worth doing, but I was told this is how Java works so I'll suggest it
anyway  :)

>  - Enter and Escape
> 
>    Calum suggests that these correspond to OK and Cancel, and that
>    they not exist in dialogs that have other buttons.

Actually, if that's what I said it's not really what I meant-- I'll have
to check that!  Enter should correspond to the default button, it
needn't necessarily be labelled "OK".  (The proposal that "Esc" should
only ever mean "Cancel" is correct, though... if Esc can mean "Close" in
some dialogs, for example, you start messing with people's mental models
a bit-- after all, "Close" is really just the same as "OK" except it
closes the window as well!)

> In general we need to go through Calum's document and do a diff
> between current GTK behavior and desired behavior, and file bugzilla
> reports for each required modification to current behavior. Any
> volunteers?  ;-)

I'm happy to make a start on this myself if need be... I had figured on
doing as much this week anyway, once I'd updated the document.  Equally
though, if somebody else wants to do it I wouldn't complain :)

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