Re: Stock items - toolbar label vs. menu label

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

Colm Smyth wrote:
> 
> I agree that being able to tab into and through an app's toolbar is
> important, but for long toolbars it could increase the effort needed
> to get to, say, the first input widget if that's what you normally
> want to get to.

True, I wouldn't envisage that a toolbar is in the "normal" tab sequence
of a window any more than its menu bar is.

> Maybe the toolbar's buttons should be logically after the main elements in
> a dialog (in terms of tab order) and we need a shortcut key to move
> the focus to the first toolbar button (with <space> to activate, as usual) ?

We should probably remind ourselves how Java handles this; it has
navigable toolbars.  (Anybody know off-hand of a Java app with toolbars
we can look at?)  

Java doesn't do it with a special shortcut key, as far as I recall, but
perhaps that's not such a bad idea.  We're proposing F10 to activate the
menu bar and Shift+F10 for a popup menu-- so without having checked to
see if it's used for anything else, perhaps Ctrl+F10 could cycle focus
through each of the available toolbars...?  Just a thought.

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