Re: [Evolution-hackers] About mail-composer's keyborad navigation

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On 31 Mar 2006, at 23:50, guenther wrote:

> > I find that when we navigation the mail-composer window with  
> > keyboard,
> > the toolbar between "Subject" line and mail body will never get the
> > focus. I knew someone complained about focusing toolbar, because user
> > cannot easily enough go to the body. But through the follow
> > link(http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/input- 
> > keyboard.html)
> > we should make the toolbar focusable, and it is easily to make a  
> > patch
> > for this. What should we fix this?
>
> Oh hell, please, no. :-)
>
> Everything inside the formatting toolbar is accessible via the menu  
> and
> its shortcuts, most of them even have an accelerator. That formatting
> toolbar never should get focus by tab cycling, IMHO.
>
>
> While you are typing a mail (let's assume HTML) and want to bold some
> part, just use Alt-M S B, or even simpler Ctrl-B. (Well, or use the
> mouse, which likely was used anyway to select the part that's going to
> be formatted.)
>
> Now imagine the formatting toolbar would be accessible using the Tab
> key. That would be like 10 (ten!) times hitting Shift-Tab, then  
> Space to
> toglle it, and 10 times hitting Tab to get back to the body. Would
> anyone seriously even consider this?

This isn't how toolbar keynav is supposed to work.  It's designed to  
work like panel keynav, in that the toolbar itself is in the Tab  
chain, not every control on the toolbar.  Once a toolbar has focus,  
you use the arrow keys to focus items on the toolbar, space to select/ 
activate them, and [Shift]-Tab to move focus out of the toolbar again.

This is standard gtk behaviour these days AFAIK (see http:// 
bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54047), so if Evo isn't doing it,  
we're delivering an inconsistent desktop experience wrt accessibility.

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