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Hi Calum, Hans Petter, This sounds interesting. Any way to see and play with a prototype (and to get user feedback on it)? I also wonder whether and to what extent Compiz might play a role here (though perhaps we don't want to make a dependency on that just yet)... Regards, Peter Cc'ing gnome-accessibility-list too... On 28 Nov 2007, at 23:23, Hans Petter Jansson wrote:I've been discussing accessibility/usability with visually impaired users lately, and one thing that came up, and that I believe to be low-hanging fruit, is the problem of windows being bigger than the screen in one or both dimensions. This happens frequently for visually impaired users, since they generally have very large fonts. I was told by one user that the way he worked around this was by going to the control panel, choosing a smaller font temporarily, moving the window, then setting the big font again. Of course, he was very happy to hear about the alt+drag shortcut. Which made me wonder if there's a more discoverable way of moving windows around when they're too big/partially off-screen. One idea that came up was automatically adding scrollbars to the windows, but I don't see how that could work reliably, and it would clutter the screen and be error-prone/hard to do technically. A better idea might be something like the following logic in the window manager: IF window is focused AND pointer is pushing against the edge of the screen AND window has area off that edge of the screen AND user is not dragging THEN move the window in the opposite direction of the edge being pushed So e.g. if you have a focused window which is partially off the right-hand side of the screen, and you push your pointer against that side, bumping into the edge, the window will move to the left until you can see its right-edge frame. The rate of movement would be equal to the number of pixels the pointer "wants" to move off-screen at each increment. Only the focused window would be affected. I think this would be a lot more discoverable and useful for everyone - not just visually impaired users - and it looks like all the required information is available to the window manager, so it shouldn't be terribly hard to implement. Thoughts? -- Hans Petter _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list Usability gnome org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability |