Re: [Usability] Keyboard navigation- outstanding issues

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

Calum Benson wrote:
> 4) Allow the programmer to set a flag on the text field that specifies
> whether it allows the entry of Tab characters or not.  If it does, Tab
> should enter the character, and Ctrl+Tab should navigate out.
> Otherwise, Tab should navigate, and Ctrl+Tab should do nothing.

I think 4) is the best way. This is because
a) There's not many text fields that needs Tab as a valid input
character (I can hardly think of one)
b) For those who really do, it should be obvious for the programmer that
this flag needs to be set
c) Unhindered Tab navigation is a very important feature for many
keyboard-navigating users, regardless of if it's because of
accessibility or people just wanting to give their mouse a rest. If I
remember correctly, the lack of decent keyboard navigation was(is?) one
of the biggest user criticisms against GNOME compared to many other
desktop environments. I think we should not waste the chance to improve
that.

In other words, I think we should optimize for the common case, and not
make an essential feature irritating and/or annoying to use because of
restrictions with the very uncommon cases, which I believe 1) would be.


> 1) Stick to the proposal: Enter always activates the default button,
> unless the widget with focus uses Enter for something itself.
> (Multi-line text widget, list control etc.).   Maintains reasonable (but
> not complete) consistency, but easy to dismiss dialog by mistake.

In this case I think 1). The reason is that the problem of people
instinctively hitting Enter by mistake after typing something into a
text field seems less important to me than the frustration of users
expecting Enter to trigger the default button. I'm not sure I would
expect the "automatically hitting Enter after Typing" behavior from
other than users very unfamiliar to desktop environments in general - I
could very well be wrong, but that is what I believe.
On the other hand, I know many users that usually don't use shortcuts or
keyboard navigation, but still know that Escape dismisses the dialog
without applying, and that Enter acts as the default button, and expect
these to work.

Maybe it's because I have a Windows background, but I think a lot of
people expect the "basic shortcuts" in a dialog to work this way.


Christian