Re: that darned accessibility capplet

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

On Fri, 2002-10-04 at 21:16, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org> writes: 
> > > - A button to open the mouse preferences dialog.
> > Havoc was not thrilled with the link back to the keyboard capplet
> > and you want to add another one ? /me ducks and waits for the
> > nuclear winter to pass.
> 
> If you haven't noticed, I gave up and resigned myself to this control
> panel sticking out as "that unattractive/overcomplicated control panel
> in its own submenu." I've made my views known, as have Seth, Jeff,
> Jonathan, but there seems to be some kind of communication gap where
> you guys just don't see the problem.

Hi Havoc:

This observation cuts both ways, as I think many of the suggestions made
about this capplet have failed to understand the accessibility
requirements.  This particular UI (unlike others we've discussed in an
"accessibility context") is truly an accessibility-centric dialog, so in
this case accessibility needs should be paramount.  

I believe we have addressed (though not solved) all of the issues which
have been raised in one way or another; if we weren't listening, we
would not be spending precious time talking about capplet redesign now. 

As for the button pointing back to the Mouse preferences dialog, I don't
advocate widespread use of such web-like UI links.  However I do think
that such a button would be a significant benefit for AccessX users, and
the absence of such in previous keyboard accessibility designs is partly
a consequence of AccessX historically being an add-on rather than
integrated into the desktop controls.  If we provide a "mouse" tab on
the accessibility capplet, then I think users may expect to see other
mouse-related features of interest to accessibility here.  We could of
course tell the users in Help documents or elsewhere, "Go the the Mouse
dialog", but I don't see why just adding the dialog launcher button is
more onerous.

Likewise I don't have a problem with refactoring the menu structure; if
we extend the "Keyboard Accessibility" dialog to be more than a rehash
of old AccessX GUIs, it may make sense to make "Accessibility" the
menu-leaf rather than a submenu.  However that would mean that it would
no longer be "Keyboard Accessibility", but instead it would be
"Accessibility", with "Keyboard", "Mouse", and "Filter" tabs and also
something like an "Assistive Technologies" tab.  However I do think
these things are very closely interrelated, so I don't think we can just
make one of these changes in isolation.

I have suggested changing "ms" to "seconds" in the UI.  Does anyone
still think that minor change from previous "AccessX" dialogs would
present a problem for users?  Using the word "milliseconds" does not
really seem better to me.

-Bill

> I don't know how to bridge the gap, no one else is really caring, so I
> guess I'll live with it for the time being. Maybe it will improve over
> time.
> 
> > > I've also changed the units from "msecs" back to "ms" in accordance with
> > > the latest draft of the GNOME Documentation styleguide:
> > > http://developer.gnome.org/documents/style-guide/apbs02.htm
> > Fine by me.
> 
> Note, the style guide does not say to use the abbreviation, it just
> says which abbreviation to use if you do use it. Spelling milliseconds
> has to be better, probably worth losing some slider length to allow
> this.
> 
> Havoc