[orca-list] Gnome Panel Navigation with Hardy, alt+tab and Listnav Opinions

[Veli-Pekka Tätilä <vtatila gmail com>]

Hi list,

Here is  how things work from the desktop for me using Orca and Gnome in
Ubuntu 8.04.

First the top panel reachable with alt+control+tab. if you  tab 0 times:
afterwords the most recently used component appears to get the focus.
Orca only promts menu bar, no matter what that component is, though.

after getting there, tabbing  so many times that Orca says menu bar in
actual navigation. you'll then  know that you've reached the actual menu
bar at the top  

Using arrows here wraps around the three menus application, places,
system. However, if I have activated one of the menus with arrows , then
tabbing does nothing  - does not tab out of the menus. Following are in
relation to having tabbed to this menu bar:

tab once: you get to Fire Fox 
Tab twice: you get to Evolution 
tab trice: gets you to help 
tab 4 times. gets you to user switcher, which is prompted, as well.

If you tab once: you can also, confusingly, use the left /right arrows
the same way as the tab key for the first three items. Tabbing once and
hitting right 4 times, however, speaks nothing. But if you then hit
right , Orca   says menu bar, and if you next hit  right  once, again
Orca speaks a menu with my name in it. Apparently that menu has no
initial selection,. Confusingly, hitting tab four times does not speak
anything.  
but if I use  the arrows  a little I get the same menu mentioned
previously. Apparently tab and arrow navigation are roughly equivalent
but their prompting and behavior differs slightly.

tabbing five or six times again utters nothing,. However, either using
arrows after those tabs or tabbing straight seven times comes up with
the volume control. Apparently it opens some sort of panel on getting
the focus. That is if I try to use the arrows after that they adjust the
volume, with no feedback from Orca. Escc or enter are the only routes
out from there, I think.

Tabbing 8 times lands me on the date and tabbing nine times to something
related to logging off.  After that the tab navigation wraps,  However,
using lefgt/right at the right end of the panel  does not   wrap. Also,
breaking logical navigation, up/down does not have the same meaning as
left/right in panel navigation, so the user must realize the panel is a
horizontal component.  The keyboard interface of  say sliders is
orientation independent.

Finally, going through the bottom panel:  Here are  are only  4 items I
can arrow lefft/right consistantly. That is show desktop, this Gedit,
workspace switcher and something called mysteriously  embedded
compoenent. 

The good thing in the bottom panel is that arrows work exactly
equivalently to the tab keys there. Oddly the arrows wrap in the bottom
panel but not in the top panel.
 
And now for something completely different.  Fairly strong  views on
Gnome keyboard usability for power users, and some disappointment that
things are so unimaginatively Windows like:

To make the panel navigation less  linear would be nice if I could use
the page keys, home/end, control+navigation  or typeahead navigation. in
Win32 I may hit super+b, and type ahead  navigate based on the first
letter of systray items, which saves time. Of course Gnome's  typeahead
is already better, with no time out, and proper editing. I wish it would
let me use wild cards, anchors and also filter the list, not just select
an item, based on PCRE  regexp,. I use them all the time in a text
editor and have a Gedit add-on  for the Python  version. 

Oh yeah. Why cannot alt+tab be sticky, support  numbers for direct
entry, type ahead matching and regexp  filtering with real time feedback
of focused item after every press. i love Win32  list views because of
that feedback. The trouble with the Gnome model of list navigation is
that as the matching item doesn't get the screen reader  focus
instantly, you only know after tabbing around, which item currently
matches, and cannot fluently continue further typing. Why could not let
letters ed      it the search string and navigation keys navigate the list
portion since the search field is single line anyway.

Lastly, alt+tabbing sequentially is  darn slow. And the fact that
minimized windows appear in alt+tab makes minimization a useless hiding
tac for the blind. In Win32, which has the same problem, I use a
minimize to tray applet, to have windows out of the alt+tab order.