Re: panel prelight on focus

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On Tue, 2002-03-19 at 20:24, Bill Haneman wrote:
> Seth Nickell wrote:
> > 
> > On Tue, 2002-03-19 at 07:37, Calum Benson wrote:
> > > Alex Larsson wrote:
> > > >
> > > > We could always make it a preference so that only people who really need
> > > > it can enable it. I think the current prelighting behaviour is one of the
> > > > most irritating things in gnome2.
> > >
> > > We could; that always kind of strikes me as a bit of a cop-out though.
> > > IMHO the default behaviour ought to be complete/consistent/accessible by
> > > default (within reason), so that people who don't need/want particular
> > > things can switch them off, rather than forcing people who rely on such
> > > things having to find and switch them on.
> > 
> > Yeah, I agree. But unfortunately not all conflicts are resolvable, and
> > there will be some tweaks necessary to turn on accesibility. For
> > example, GNOME shouldn't screenread by default, that's something people
> > will have to turn on ;-)
> 
> Seth:
> 
> that may be true of some accessibility things, but visual focus
> indication
> is non-negotiable, it just has to be there.  So this discussion should
> be
> about how to implement it and what it should look like.

Why is it non-negotiable? Lets say that there was no mechanism for
indicating visual focus that did not disturb "normal" users. In that
case, I would say we should not indicate visual focus for the panel
itself. Its wrong to sacrifice usability of the majority for usability
of a small minority.

When a small minority wants a feature that's bad for the majority we
generally consider it a crack feature [1]. I don't see why we should
treat the situation any differently just because the minority in this
case happens to be disabled.

But this is all very theoretical, since I'm pretty sure we can find a
solution that does not necessitate comprimising usability as
accessibility for general usability.

Can somebody make a shot of how it would look to draw the dotted-line
borders around the panel to indicate focus? I have trouble believing
that's not sufficiently visible. How is it any different for the panel
than for, say, a button? 

-Seth

[1] The situation is a little different when it makes it totally
unusable for that minority, but I don't think that is the case here.
There are solutions for panel accesibility that, while not as desirable,
do not require visually indicating focus of the panel itself. For
example, it has been suggested over and over that the first object on
the panel be focused instead of the panel. So it makes it much harder to
use for this minority, and perhaps they lose a few GNOME features, yes,
but it does not severely comprimise GNOME. I expect many non-technical
users wouldn't even discover/use the panel right click menu (which is
the main motivation I can think of for focusing the panel itself).