Re: [orca-list] Dragging and dropping with orca, KBD Interface Critique

[Veli-Pekka Tätilä <vtatila mail student oulu fi>]

krister kristersplace ws wrote:
> On 29 May 2007 at 22:39, Henrik Nilsen Omma wrote:
> > How will this differ from cutting (Ctrl+X) and pasting (Ctrl+V)
> > though? What could you do with drag and drop that you cannot do with
> > cut and paste?
> There are situations, such as in certain audio editing and music
> software wher you are to manipulate widgets and such and in that
> case, you can't copy/
> paste.
Exactly, and not just audio apps iether. Think of diagram editing or 
anything remotely graphical that's based on direct manipulation. Any 
cursorless area in which the user has to use the mouse to select stuff 
presents similar problems. many readers implement D&D, that's drag and drop 
not dungeons and dragons <ssmile>, as marking the source object for dragging 
and the destination object for dropping. But another equally useful thing 
would be the ability to drag with the left or right button an arbitrary 
vertical, horizontal or circular amount measured in pixels. This kind of 
dragging is used to manipulate controls like knobs, which is not about 
dragging one object to another.

Yet another thing, in which at least the MAc requires drag and drop, is 
lists in which you have to re-arrange items by preference e.g. preferred 
languages on the Web. In addition to screen reader based D&D, I've seen 
up/down buttons and keyboard interfaces for moving e.g. alt+arrows.

And howabout re-arranging and re-sizing columns in what people call tables, 
multi-column list views or deetails views depending on context? Windows does 
not provide a keyboard interface for any of this in the control directly, 
and if the Linux folks have been borrowing without thinking, I suppose 
neither does Gnome. I honestly think MS made a mistake with that particular 
control and having to suffer from it ten years in various apps, it is 
extremely annoying to see the same poor keyboard interface being duplicated, 
say in OS X. Sory, I just feel strongly about this, and wanted to get the 
point across (ho offense ment, <smile>). I honestly hope Gnome and all the 
rest of the Linux GUis do better keybordwise. So, the question, can you 
re-arrange columns in a multi-column list from the keyboard in Gnome? In 
WIndows, screne reader based D&D or duplicating the functionality in a 
dialog box (think OE or Explorer's choose columns) are some of the 
work-arounds.

Back to mousy things, though, the fundamental problem is at the app end, 
though, failing to provide a keyboard interface for custom controls like 
knobs, sliders, points in graphs etc...  I see no reason why knobs could not 
have the same keyboard interface as sliders do: up/right for small 
increment, pg up/down for larger units and home/end for  reaching min and 
max. Its just that once things get custom enough, people stop payihng 
attention to keyboard interfaces, which is sad. And its quite common that 
you even cannot type in or see values directly, because the original thing 
they are emulating or modelling could not do that either, which annoys the 
heck out of me. It happens an awful lot in the synth plug world for no real 
reason.

How is the Linux music software in this regard? Most Vst plugs and hosts are 
keyboard nightmares to say the least, and I'm afraid this mousy philosophy 
might have carried over to LInux as wel. How is ardour, for example, which 
should be GTK+ 2 based and thus potentially accessible? a friend of mine has 
been hyping that one a lot lately. He also runs VST plugs under WIne but no 
ORca there, of course.

> want to put an audio loop on a track you have to drag it there.
Not only that but you have to drag, too, when you want to extend a pattern. 
from a keyboard user point of view, this makes no sense at all. I mean, if I 
know I want 10 times pattern x, 12 times pattern y and 10 times pattern z, 
that's a lot of D&D which can be very slow full-sscreen magnified. It would 
be an order of magnitude faster for me to simply supply a repeat count.

--
With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila mail student oulu fi)
Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming:
http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila/