Re: selectable labels

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Calum Benson <calum benson ireland sun com> writes:
> 
> Presumably the menu will be extensible by the programmer, though?  (For
> example, a "Help" menu item would be useful, for context sensitive help
> on the label, or on the control that the label is describing).

Yes, we have some sort of mechanism for that already for entries.

> 
> > I'd even welcome if one could always copy from labels, so perhaps
> > selectable should be the default. I do not see the point in a right-click
> > menu however.
>

The right-click menu is to copy to the clipboard; simply selecting the
label doesn't do that. See
http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/clipboards.txt
 
> Well, if-and-when we get a standard keyboard shortcut for popping up
> context menus (like Shift+F10 or the menu key in MS Windows), I can see
> it might have an accessibility benefit.  But not a huge one, if you
> could select the label and hit Ctrl+C anyway.

Hmm, I have no idea how to add Ctrl+C support to the label, for the
same reason this is hard:

> Perhaps more importantly, people who can't use a mouse could only select
> and copy the label if it was part of the tab sequence, which labels
> shouldn't normally be-- anyone got any thoughts on how to get around
> that?
> 

Exactly, there's no way to put the key focus on a label. We could make
selectable labels focusable widgets, but that seems pretty wrong to
me.

Though maybe it makes sense if we say that selectable labels should
only be used when you really have data that's likely to get
copied. i.e. labels that are just tags for GUI elements shouldn't be
selectable, selectable labels should be used e.g. for displaying the
current time or some other variable data. At that point it could make
sense to say that you can put key focus on the label.

Definitely though if you have a big form full of entries, I can see
data entry clerks getting pretty upset if they have to tab through the
labels to get to the entries. ;-)

Havoc