Re: Is keynav to unavailable menu items a bug?

["Dr. Clue (A.K.A Ian Storms)" <drclue drclue net>]

The fact that a menu item is disabled, is non the less important
information, and more importantly it's part of the navigational
pathway.

Many folks get used to pressing a sequence or pathway of navigation
keys , without ever waiting to see or hear them, and if a few
arrow keys is quicker than a hot key , that's the way they'll go.

It would be really frustrating to have to pick ones way through an
inconsistent menu, simply because the paste buffer did or did not have 
something in it at the moment, and the "paste" menu item's (disappearing 
and reappearing) kept making the keyboard navigational path change.

It is easy for an AT to throw away information, but it's
not near as easy to reclaim same, so logic would seem
to indicate that the object should navigate the same as always
so that the AT's event processor will have the opportunity
to process the object whose attribute indicate it's disabled state.

Perhaps the AT could simply speak the grayed item softly,
as thats what the visual graying does for sighted folks. The
information is still perceived but an attribute of the perception
conveys the state.

If the AT and it's user options wanted to make disabled menu labels
vanish from perception, that is only a few lines of AT code, but I'd
recommend against it.


Peter Korn wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> On the GNOME desktop (as opposed to Windows), it isn't possible to arrow 
> through unavailable items in a menu.  Arrowing up/down in menus skips 
> over those items that are grey-ed out.
>
> When Mozilla is running on GNOME, Mozilla behaves as it does on Windows 
> - you can arrow to unavailable menu items (and if you are running 
> Gnopernicus, you will be told that these items aren't available).  This 
> has led to some confusion on the part of our testers (see bug #155506in 
> bugzilla, at: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=155506).
>
> I'm curious what folks' thoughts are on this...
>
>
> Peter Korn
> Sun Accessibility team
>
> _______________________________________________
> mozilla-accessibility mailing list
> mozilla-accessibility mozilla org
> http://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/mozilla-accessibility

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