Re: New panel logout/shutdown alert - a mini ui review

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On 10 Feb 2006, at 12:31, Bill Haneman wrote:

> Anyhow, the less stuff we make "special" to accessibility, the better.
> If something really requires a timeout, then the timeout should be
> configurable.  In many cases, the better solution is not to use a
> timeout at all.

Just to play devil's advocate, does something as long as 2 minutes (I  
forget if that's how long it is in GNOME, but it is in OS X) really  
count as a "timeout" in the conventional sense?  It's fairly obvious  
why things that disappear after a second or two are bad for  
accessibility, but if it takes any user 2 minutes to read and react  
to what should be a reasonably simple alert box, then we're failing  
them big time anyway, and we have more important accessibility issues  
to address to put that right.

(I guess there's always the scenario where the user might return to  
their keyboard to find their cat has triggered the shutdown and  
there's only 5 seconds left to cancel it, but at that point it's a  
race against time for any user-- the 5 second threshold may just be a  
bit more or less depending on how they have to read and react to the  
dialog.)

Cheeri,
Calum.

--
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            Java Desktop System Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems