Re: Scrolled window keyboard navigation

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

Owen Taylor wrote:

> [ Note, Control-Home/End Home/End are reversed from the
>   keynav table. I think this is more consistent with the
>   way that text widgets works ]

Hmm, interesting, I'd never thought of that.  When you compare them with
a list widget though, it might seem a little odd... would you expect
Home or Ctrl+Home to select the first item in a list-- and which would
you expect to scroll the view all the way to the left?

>  * The patch currently doesn't draw any focus indication if the
>    focus window itself is focused. I don't want to reserve the
>    space for a focus rectangle around the scrolled window since
>    the scrolled window will be focused so rarely. 

True, although you could argue that things like lists should also get
this sort of focus indicator when an item in the list is selected.  For
example:

http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/presentations/GUADEC/keyboardaccess.html

In this case, an item in the list has focus, but there's no way of
knowing, because the focused item happens to have been scrolled out of
view.

>    My idea currently is that a good focus
>    indication might be to draw focus indicator rectangles within
>    the thumbs of the two scrollbars.

That could work, although my feeling is that it might be a little odd if
both scrollbars had focus at the same time-- not to mention potentially
tricky for something like a focus-following screen magnifier to keep up
with.

>  * If the scrolled window contains multiple focusable widgets in
>    it, then scrolling the scrolled window wwith these bindings
>    can result in the focus widget being scrolled out of the
>    visible area. (This is poor UI design, of course.) The
>    scrolled window example in testgtk demonstrates this issue
>    well.

True, I guess this is kind of related to the example I linked to above.

>    Control-arrows can be used for directional focusing, but I
>    think it might be better to reverse things and use
>    control-arrows to scroll the scrolled window and leave the
>    arrows working normally for widgets within the widget.

I think that sounds like the more sensible approach too.

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