Re: [Evolution-hackers] [UI] attachment dropdown focus hijacking (mouse)

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Thu, 2003-10-16 at 00:00, Ettore Perazzoli wrote:

> This is one of my pet peeves actually, I *hate* that when you click on
> the toolbar it gets the keyboard focus.  You never want that; it's
> annoying e.g. if you want to cut / paste some text, and you have to use
> the mouse to bring the focus back where you want it.

Agreed, toolbars are a bit of a special case... it's very rare that
you'd ever want to focus a toolbar control (other than some sort of
list/combo) with the mouse since there's almost never anything further
you can do with it once it has focus.  (And in gtk 2.4 we'll finally
have a consistent way of navigating to any toolbar from the keyboard
anyway, for those who need to.)  

It's debatable whether that applies here, though, since both halves of
the attachment button are (or should be) futher manipulable from the
keyboard once they have focus.  In fact you should probably really even
be able to use Ctrl-C on a focused attachment button to copy the
attachment (followed by Ctrl-V to paste it into a file manager window),
as an accesible alternative to dragging and dropping it.

> Hmm maybe this would be a better fix, but I am not sure.  The user still
> expects the vertical cursor keys to move the focus around...

True, I guess if you had multiple attachments, users might expect
vertical arrow keys to move focus to move between them rather than just
scrolling the page.  Having said that, we've been pretty careful since
the GNOME 2.0 days only to document [Shift-]Tab as the means of moving
focus *between* controls (even though arrow keys still kind of work in
most places), and arrow keys for moving focus *within* controls: see
http://www.gnome.org/learn/access-guide/2.2/keynav-1.html#keynav-2.  

But I guess even that's a bit of a grey area here... does the HTML view
count as a "control" itself...?  (I'd say probably not, from the user's
perspective.)

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