Re: [Usability] Discoverable off-screen window dragging

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

Cc'ing gnome-accessibility-list too...


On 28 Nov 2007, at 23:23, Hans Petter Jansson wrote:

> I've been discussing accessibility/usability with visually impaired
> users lately, and one thing that came up, and that I believe to be
> low-hanging fruit, is the problem of windows being bigger than the
> screen in one or both dimensions.
>
> This happens frequently for visually impaired users, since they
> generally have very large fonts.
>
> I was told by one user that the way he worked around this was by going
> to the control panel, choosing a smaller font temporarily, moving the
> window, then setting the big font again. Of course, he was very  
> happy to
> hear about the alt+drag shortcut.
>
> Which made me wonder if there's a more discoverable way of moving
> windows around when they're too big/partially off-screen.
>
> One idea that came up was automatically adding scrollbars to the
> windows, but I don't see how that could work reliably, and it would
> clutter the screen and be error-prone/hard to do technically.
>
> A better idea might be something like the following logic in the  
> window
> manager:
>
> IF window is focused AND
>    pointer is pushing against the edge of the screen AND
>    window has area off that edge of the screen AND
>    user is not dragging
> THEN
>    move the window in the opposite direction of the edge being pushed
>
> So e.g. if you have a focused window which is partially off the
> right-hand side of the screen, and you push your pointer against that
> side, bumping into the edge, the window will move to the left until  
> you
> can see its right-edge frame. The rate of movement would be equal  
> to the
> number of pixels the pointer "wants" to move off-screen at each
> increment. Only the focused window would be affected.
>
> I think this would be a lot more discoverable and useful for  
> everyone -
> not just visually impaired users - and it looks like all the required
> information is available to the window manager, so it shouldn't be
> terribly hard to implement.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> --
> Hans Petter
>
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--
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems