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Joseph,

In addition to getting input from the current users, I think it may be helpful to think about the impacts of different vision impairments, and what features may best help folks with those differences. For example, some people experience a loss of central vision (e.g. macular degeneration), while others a loss of peripheral vision (e.g. glaucoma).

To help answer your questions about whether these settings are best provided independently of one another (or linked together), it would be good to seek opinions from folks across the spectrum of vision impairments.


Regards,

Peter

On 2/14/2014 8:25 AM, Joseph Scheuhammer wrote:
Improvements to the magnifier preferences dialog have been suggested. A mockup, courtesy of Allan Day, can be found at the following URL: https://raw.github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/system-settings/universal-access/zoom-and-filters.png

One of the additions is a check box labelled "Keep keyboard focus in view" that is on the left hand "Zoom" panel. This is for toggling the activation of focus/caret tracking.

The gnome-shell magnifier supports tracking modes for widget focus, caret focus, and mouse pointer movement. Furthermore, these are independent of each other. However, the proposed dialog combines them. The radio buttons above the check box list different mouse tracking modes, i.e. "Push with pointer", "Follow pointer", and "Keep pointer centered". Whatever mode is set for the mouse will be used for both focus and caret tracking.

The question is what do magnifier users want or need regarding tracking types? Are there use cases for having the types of tracking independent of each other? Or, if the user chooses "centered" for one, that applies to all? We would really like user input.

To give a better idea of what this is about, I'll be the use case, since I use a magnifier on occasion, and at a low magnification factor (1.75x). My preference is "push" for mouse and caret tracking, but "centered" for focus tracking.

With respect to the mouse, I prefer it behave as close as possible to the non-magnifier experience. On a standard desktop, the mouse moves, not the contents. The mouse tracking mode that comes the closest to that experience is "push", where the contents do not move in the magnified view until the mouse abuts up against an edge. When it does, the contents do move, but only enough to bring them into view.

For myself, the text caret works in a similar way. When using a word processor, the caret generally moves in small increments -- left, right, up, and down -- and I prefer that the contents not move until they need to.

However, when using the keyboard to tab-navigate around the UI, widget focus frequently jumps over large distances. For example, I may be near the bottom of the screen editing a text document when I use alt+tab to use the task switcher. Focus moves (warps) to the centre of the screen, far from where I was typing. I need to reorientto the new screen contents (my point of regard, so to speak), and, in my case, that is helped by centering the widget that just acquired focus -- I prefer "centered" tracking for changes in widget focus. Trying to preserve little or no movement in the contents is pointless here since focus is likely to move large distances.

Now, that's just me, and I stress that I am **not**putting my preferences forward as any kind of standard. In fact, quite the opposite. Those are my user preferences. I fully expect other magnifier users to have different ones, and we would like to know yours so that we fully understand the needs and can incorporate them into the UI being designed: Do you use the same tracking mode for focus, caret, and mouse or different modes for each? And if you use different modes, why?

Thanks.




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