RE: [Usability] Keyboard navigation- outstanding issues

["Jeff Henrikson" <jehenrik yahoo com>]

> Please don't make irrelevant references to the Nazi period, that doesn't
> make your point stronger.

I am very sorry.  I don't usually deal with a context of people who might consider this sensitive.

> Perhaps I oversaw something somewhere, but could you clarify what was
> wrong with using Ctrl+Tab in the case of a multiline textfield?

Nothing particularly wrong with it if it's for getting out of the field.  I don't have a problem with that.  I would be annoyed to
type an email all with ctrl-tab though, and I think most people wouldn't figure it out at all if ctrl-tab was the only way to get a
tab.  I don't think that's optimizing the common case.

> > And if you really need to mix single and multiline controls in one
> > box, it might be a good idea to ask yourself why.
>
> umm, for instance, if you want a quick-search bar and a text input bar in
> one window?

Not sure what you mean by those two things, but I think an email box with to, cc, subject as single line and a text body as
multiline suffices as a passable example.

Such a dialog can be made to work by using alt+shortcuts to make navigating up to the single lines easy, and allowing tab to be
used in the normal way to go down to the message body.  In fact, allowing shift+tab as focus backward makes it almost as good as a
regular dialog, since the only thing you are not allowed to do is wrap the focus from the end to the beginning with tab.

This is obviously generalizes to anything that has one multiline field which can be arranged at the bottom of the box.

My point was that it is a minority case where one needs to arbitrarily mix single and several multiline controls.  If there were
say 5 multiline controls and nothing else in a box, it seems like the most prudent thing would be to label them and underline a
letter for an alt+letter shortcut.  This seems like a good general policy for several multiline boxes.  It only gets annoying if
you throw in a few single line fields and expect the dialog to feel as good as a specialized dialog made only of several single
line controls.

Note that in general it is nice if single line entries can have focuses (foci?) that follow one another so as to not be interrputed
by interspersed check boxes or radio buttons or other things.  Tab is a home-row accessible key (arrows are not whoever suggested
them!) and can make touch typing fields fast, especially if they are consistently one tab apart.  This usually happens by accident
with GTK dialogs because the programmers usually box visually similar controls together.


Jeff Henrikson