Re: [Usability] Control Center Appearance Capplet

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Wed, 2007-04-18 at 19:21 +0100, Thomas Wood wrote:

> Maybe we get some of these things with the new Xrandr? I haven't been 
> following it too closely. The problem I can see here though, is that 
> Display may not be an obvious place to look for when wanting to set font 
> options.

I agree, especially now that we're all used to looking in the Fonts
capplet for them.

The trick if we did that would probably be to re-cast those settings as
something affecting the overall 'display quality', rather than something
specific to fonts.  For that matter, it would probably be worth
revisiting whether we really need to offer such an exuberant choice of
font rendering settings anyway; Mac and Windows seem to manage fine with
much less.

> > Well, IIRC, the sort of concerns raised at the time were:
> > 
> > - Without the Close button, a blind user has to infer that the dialog is
> > instant apply by the absence of any action buttons.  The presence of the
> > Close button gives them a more positive indication.
> 
> I think this goes against what the Novell studies show, and what I 
> suggested in the beginning. Does a Close button really indicate explicit 
> apply? I would suggest that for the many people who don't realise the 
> difference between Close and Cancel, it really only serves to confuse 
> matters further.

That may be true for sighted users, but I don't think Novell tested with
any users who were relying on screenreaders for their information (I'd
be delighted to hear otherwise, though), so I'm not sure it would be
wise to draw any conclusions about their needs from that particular
study.

> However, there is also the option of using the 
> Escape key, which currently also closes the preference windows.

FWIW, that's also a decision that the accessibility team (and I) were
somewhat opposed to, because it means 'Esc' effectively has opposite
meanings in different kinds of windows, and that just seems to be asking
for trouble really :)

After a few years we just gave up arguing about that one, though, as it
became clear it was going to be implemented regardless... despite the
fact that the vast majority of bugs filed about Esc "not closing the
window" applied specifically to the gedit Find dialog IIRC, which
suggested to me that the problem lay more with the design of that
particular window (or at least, Find dialogs in general).

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems