Re: [Usability] Gnome HIG suggestion: search box clear buttons

[Matt Fellows <matt fellows onegeek com au>]

> What would not be feasible is showing about four or more different
> states using nothing more than color.  Even if you found a set of
> colors that work for both red-green (common) and blue-yellow (less
> common) color blindness, you'll still create a problem for the rare
> black-and-white color-blind users.
> 
> You also have to consider your low-vision users, which constitutes
> a large percentage of older folks.  For these people, patterns like
> my striped background could be problematic.

I agree with what you are saying, I never said that we didn't rely on
colors as the only mechanism for discriminating between different states
- I said that we shouldn't :)

I also agree with the idea that we shouldn't have one hundred different
colours to represent state, I think we could get away with just two; the
active search state, and the error state. If the program is smart enough
to detect an inconsistent state couldn't we just prevent the state from
occurring by clearing the search field? Or am I missing something
important?

> And, by the way, in my previous email I also advocated having an
> API in GTK+ for this.  Ross responded that the new named colors
> would work, if we could agree on some standard color names.  I
> believe we need a higher-level API like:
> 
>   gtk_entry_set_state (GtkEntry      *entry,
>                        GtkEntryState  state);
>   typedef enum {
>     GTK_ENTRY_STATE_ACTIVE,
>     GTK_ENTRY_STATE_INCONSISTENT,
>     GTK_ENTRY_STATE_ERROR
>   } GtkEntryState;
> 
> The colors/patterns/whatever then become a side effect of this.
> This will help our blind users considerably, because their screen
> readers will be able to tell thm exactly what's going on.  With
> just colors, they'll have to infer some meaning from a textual
> description of visual cues that they may have never even learned.

I'm not well acquainted with gory insides of the GTK+ API but if I
understand what your suggesting correctly - that is that the search
field will convey it's state to the user via the screen reader - then it
seems we have our redundancy. It would be nice to have named colours
though that could be re-used across apps.

Cheers,

Matt