Re: new "Add layout" dialog

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Tue, 2007-03-27 at 12:21 +0100, Sergey Udaltsov wrote:
> > Why not just write something like "(default)" after the default entry?
> The text "default (default)" looks pretty odd to me, I must admit.
> What do you think?
> 
> > Perhaps not the prettiest option, but certainly the most accessible, I
> > would think.
> Is separator not accessible enough? 

Well yes, it's accessible in the sense that a screenreader wouldn't have
any problems with it.  (I forget off-hand if screenreaders even bother
to tell the user about separators, as their usual purpose is purely
visual).  I was thinking more of the semantic issue-- how does the
screenreader know that the separator is there to separate the default
choice from the other choices, and use that information to tell the user
which is the default option? [1]

Same if you used an icon to indicate the default choice-- a screenreader
would see the icon and inform the user of its presence, but I'm guessing
you'd have to do a little extra work to have a screenreader tell the
user *why* it was there.

So I'm sure it's perfectly possible to make the icon and separator
solutions usefully accessible, I think it would just require a little
extra work that using text would avoid.

Cheeri,
Calum.

[1] In this case, that's actually a problem for sighted users too, I
suppose-- they'd just have to know, guess or figure out the purpose of
the separator for themselves, but at least they'd have some visual
context to help.


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

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems