Re: colorsel keynav

[Calum Benson <calum benson ireland sun com>]

Havoc Pennington wrote:

> For the triangle, I made the outer ring and the inner triangle
> separately focusable. You can tab between them. Arrow keys are used to
> move around the ring or inside the triangle.

Sounds good! (Can you can use all four arrow keys to move around the
circle, rather than just left/right or up/down?  Otherwise things could
get confusing...)

>  - the triangle is ugly now, because I'm using the black border
>    for focus indication, which means no black border by default;
>    suggested fixes are either a) use gray border by default, darken
>    to black for focus or b) always use a neutral gray background,
>    regardless of theme, so you can see the colors, and then there
>    are fewer contrast worries

I prefer the sound of (a) here, although it's hard to say without seeing
it in practice with different themes.  (By "use gray border by default",
do you mean "some hard-coded gray" or "some appropriate colour chosen
from the theme"?).  

For (b), did you mean show the whole dialog on a neutral grey
background, or just the colour wheel?  Ugliness aside, you could get
away with showing just the colour wheel on a grey slab, provided there
weren't any text labels included on the slab too.  Changing the
background colour of the whole dialog would be a no-no, though-- some
people will be relying on the colours in their theme to make the desktop
usable at all, e.g. high-contrast themes for some visually-impaired
users.

Another option might be just to change the appearance of the selection
"cursors" in the circle/triangle depending on which of the two had
focus.  (Sort of like the "secondary highlighting" you get in list/tree
controls that lets you see which items are selected even though the
control no longer has focus).  E.g. in the circle, you could have thick
line/thin dotted line for focused/unfocused, and in the triangle, you
could have, I dunno... maybe a box around the circular cursor if it had
focus, and no box if it didn't.  (Or just fill/unfill the circular
cursor-- I don't know if you'd really miss that tiny hole in the middle
very much, as you can see the exact colour selection in the colour chip
underneath anyway).  You'd probably just have to try a few different
ideas there to see what worked best.

>  - the palette is not key navigable. Also, it draws the "active"
>    palette cell as if it were focused, so if it was key navigable, it
>    would be confusing.  Suggestion is that we draw the active cell
>    some other way. No real ideas though.

One idea off the top of my head that I've seen used elsewhere would be
to draw a small dot of a contrasting colour in the centre of the active
palette cell.  (The hard part is finding the most contrasting colour for
any given cell... perhaps to satisfy everyone the "dot" would actually
need to be three concentric circles-- one black, one white, and one the
XOR of the colour in the cell!)

>  - the eyedropper button can't have a mnemonic since it has no text.
>    You can tab to it of course, so not a big deal.

Hmm, I guess not.  A textual description of the button will need to be
available to the accessibility API too-- but that's a little further
down the road!

> Will probably commit what I have in the morning along with the event
> return val stuff, and then hack on fixing these problems up.

Sounds excellent... now all we need to work on is the other ten
gazillion dialogs in gtk and GNOME that need similar treatment  :o)

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