Re: Dialog buttons

[Calum Benson <calum benson ireland sun com>]

Liam Quin wrote:
> 
> Gooerge would be in good company -- in the open look UI, Enter moved to
> the next text entry in the dialogue until you get to the last, and then it
> moves focus to the Default Action Button, and then finally another Enter
> presses the Default Action button (which is clearly marked by a double
> ring round it, ad might say "Save settings" or "OK" or whatever).

This is certainly a fairly sane way to do things, and it would be good
to hear comments from other members of the accessibility and usability
contingent on its potential suitability for GNOME.

One problem we do have with GNOME that was less of an issue in
OpenLook's day is the wide variety of non-GNOME applications that many
people will be running on their desktop-- KDE apps, Motif apps, Java
apps, OpenOffice apps etc.  If we choose a navigation scheme that's
radically different from all of those, then we could potentially cause
more usability problems through inconsistency than we would by choosing
a sub-optimal approach for GTK/GNOME which was nonetheless closer to the
way all those others worked.

Now, maybe it would turn out that there's no such sub-optimal approach
that's consistent enough with all those other toolkits to give us a big
enough "win" over going our own way.  But it's something worth bearing
in mind as we try to reach a final decision on how to do this.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems