Re: Behavior change / Usability bugs

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Fri, 2002-10-18 at 21:14, Owen Taylor wrote:

> I have to wonder about this... Toolbars are supposed to be mouse
> shortcuts for menu navigation. Doesn't putting them in the normal tab 
> sequence just make normal keyboard nav clunky (having to tab through
> all the toolbar items if you don't know about Control-Tab) for 
> minimal gain?

You wouldn't have to tab through all the items, you'd use arrow keys for
that.  We'd have to design it so that Tab would take you onto the next
control in the tab chain, be it a toolbar or something else.

I wasn't wild about the idea when Bill suggested it either.  But having
just experimented a bit, in practice there really aren't all that many
windows with toolbars in them that you would normally Tab around
anyway-- tab navigation is mostly for dialogs, and dialogs shouldn't
have toolbars.  The rest are things like office apps and mail composer
windows where you spend most of your time either doing stuff in the main
part of the window (which more often than not uses Tab for something
else) or accessing menus (which you can't Tab to anyway).

> (On the other hand, if there are widgets like URL entries in the toolbar,
> they should be in the normal tab chain, but an app should set that
> up itself with gtk_container_set_focus_chain())

That sounds a lot harder to get right. E.g. what happens if you tab to a
control on a toolbar, then move focus to somewhere elsewhere on the
toolbar with the arrow keys... where does focus go then when you press
Tab again?

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