Re: Auto-completion popup?

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Mon, 2003-05-26 at 07:35, Bill Haneman wrote:
> Hi Kris:
> 
> OK, well I am not very comfortable with this proposal.  It is definitely
> an accessibility problem to have popups appearing without a more
> explicit user action.  I think on-demand completion is that way to go;
> however you are correct in saying that it should not be "TAB".

I think this is misguided. You are suggesting effectively removing an
extremely useful and important feature, basically, for lack of a way to
communicate to the AT what is going on.

(I say removing, because most users won't find completion if they
need to use an esoteric key combination to get to it.)

> However word completion can't be something that's accessibility
> unfriendly, under the assumption that it's a "convenience" - since it's
> a useful feature, a desktop that doesn't provide an
> accessibility-friendly way of using it is by definition not fully
> accessible.  So turning this off is not, IMO, a good option for us.

If the AT simply knew enough to know that the completion popup 
was extra "auxiliary" information to the main work flow, then
it could avoid telling the user about it until they hit down arrow to
select the first completion.

Of course, you really want to *expose* the completion set 
to the AT so that you can do more interesting things, like
list the completion choices in an onscreen keyboard.

Regards,
                                        Owen