Re: selectable labels

[Calum Benson <calum benson ireland sun com>]

Pavel Machek wrote:
>
> Great. I hate using mice. Hopefully gtk will get to the point when it
> is possible to use it from keyboard...

This is certainly the intention.  I'm currently testing several core
GNOME apps for keyboard accessibility issues, and we've just started
working on an accessibility API for Gtk which should ensure that
Gtk/GNOME apps are (or can be made to be) accessible without a mouse, or
with a screenreader or any other assistive technology.  

We'll also be working with the maintainers of as many of the core GNOME
apps as we can to help them make their apps more accessible. 
Accessibility guidelines will be included in the GNOME styleguide when
it appears, to help achieve this.

> Currently, applications such as glade do not use "underlined" letters
> do not include underlined letters in their dialogs, because gtk does
> not make it easy...

Is it really that hard?  I haven't done anything too complex, but any
dialogs I've designed and built with Glade "just work" when you add
underlines to the widget labels.  (Except the notebook widget-- if you
add underlines to notebook tabs, pressing Alt+label doesn't switch to
that tab).  

So in many cases, keyboard accessibility could be improved just by
taking the few minutes to ensure that all dialog controls have
"underlined letter" access-- I'm sure a lot of developers don't do it
just because they don't know it can or should be done.
 
> Try to control ghex from keyboard, for example. When you are inside
> editor/viewer, alt-f will not bring you to menu. In fact, I could not
> figure out how to get to the menu.

Same in gnotepad, unless you give focus to the status area first, which
isn't exactly intuitive  :o)  (Plus you can only do that with the mouse,
which rather defeats the purpose!)

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