Re: Treating GtkRadioButton as one focus point

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

Owen Taylor wrote:

> Hmm, well I guess we just need to get things close so we can
> see how it works . Personally, I don't like the idea
> of stopping at the end:

You're right, there's almost certainly a difference here between expert
users with good-to-reasonable vision, and users with vision
impairments.  I assume that ATs would be able to spot when focus had
reached the end of a group and signal the user appropriately (and even
inhibit further focus movement in that direction), though?  In which
case, perhaps we can get away with doing the wrap-around after all.

> However, the fact that Windows wraps not stops seems to indicate that 
> wrapping has at least some support in user testing.

Hmm, this is just typical-- it's the Windows Accessibility Guide that
suggests this guideline in the first place!  See below (this is Google's
cached version, they've moved the live version elsewhere and I can't
find it...):

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:EdWOZ-3Ur-k:www.microsoft.com/enable/download/dev/guidelines/Guidelines.txt

Mozilla has also picked up on this, but suggests the
wrapping/non-wrapping should be a preference... like we don't have
enough of those already :)

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ui/accessibility/access-prd.html

>  http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/keynav/gtk_buttons.html
> 
> Doesn't seem to really correspond to what's in 53577 so I'm
> not sure what the desired behavior is, but I remembered some
> idea that a group of checkbuttons should behave specially.

I think the only proposed "special" thing about a group of checkbuttons
was that the arrow keys should navigate around them, just as they do a
group of radiobuttons (but without selecting the checkboxes as you do
so).  However, this was based largely on a recollection that Windows
behaved like this, which you're about to disprove below!  (Perhaps it
was Windows 95 that behaved like this, but I'm sure some flavour did). 
In which case, maybe there doesn't really need to be anything special
about groups of checkboxes/independent toggle buttons at all.

> [ BTW, The MSWin behavior listed in the chart does not correspond to
> either the Win98 behavior (arrows do nothing in checkbuttons) or the
> Office98 behavior (arrows act as synonyms for tab/<shift>tab on radio
> buttons. I don't have more recent versions around here to test ]

I'm happy to take your word for that, I don't have a Windoze box lying
around to test right now.  When I drafted the proposal I was working
from a combination of the Windows User Experience Guide and memory,
either of which could have failed me!  I certainly wasn't aware of a
difference between Win98 and Office98 before, but that smacks of
Microsoft alright...

Actually, just reading the Windows UE guide again, there's another
potential subtlety which I didn't mention in the proposal: Windows
allows you to do Ctrl+arrows to move the focus around a radiobutton
group without selecting them as it goes.  I don't know how important
that behaviour is to worry about.

(Oh, and I see the Win UE Guide also says you "can" support arrow keys
for navigating around groups of radiobuttons and checkboxes, but not
that you *have* to... so I wasn't completely on crack!)

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