Re: new highcontrast widgets?

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On 5 Nov 2007, at 14:09, Andreas Nilsson wrote:

> Hi all!
> I wanted to investigate if we could get rid of all our Close- 
> buttons in
> some windows, since every window have a big close button in the top
> right corner anyway. (therefore less clutter)
> A big stopper for this was apparently the highcontrast themes,  
> where the
> close button in the corner hit target is pretty small apparently.

> Would something like this be doable?
> http://andreasn.se/diverse/temp/hc.png

Hmm, I don't recall the target area being the main issue[1]-- if it  
was, we'd probably just have fixed the metacity theme by now to make  
it bigger (e.g. by increasing the recommended title bar font size).

I'm pretty sure the main accessibility concern was feedback from  
screenreader users, who preferred the safety of an explicit Close  
button in the main part of instant apply windows-- i.e. one that they  
could Tab to, and that a screenreader would announce.  IIRC, there  
never used to be any way for screenreader users to tell if there was  
a close button in the title bar or not, without pressing Ctrl-W or  
Alt-F4 and listening to what happened, which is obviously an  
unsatisfactory experience. I don't know off-hand if this situation  
has improved with Orca.

(You could argue that there should always be a close button in a  
window's title bar, but that's not necessarily true-- e.g. alerts  
generally shouldn't have one because its meaning could be ambiguous,  
although metacity still puts one there anyway[2].)

Cc'ing a couple of a11y folks to get their recollections/opinions...

Cheeri,
Calum.

[1] Although it was certainly mentioned in http://bugzilla.gnome.org/ 
show_bug.cgi?id=302076

[2] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=319723

--
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems