Worth noting that Windows 3.x Paint could be used entirely from the keyboard, as the arrow keys moved the cursor and you could position it with pixel-precision. This is in addition to the fact that the rest of the OS was also entirely usable without a mouse.
GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
161–170 of 507 posts
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#162I work on ADA a lot for my company. Please put on some headphones, turn on the voice assistant of your OS, put on some blinders, and run your app or website… no mouse, just keyboard. 1. Democracy is about access; make sure everyone has access to your software. 2. The keyboard allows folks with disabilities and power users to fly through your website/app… that being said… the second a tab is off, the person with a dis…
That's a good point. Accessibility is the next step that should also not be ignored. Navigating to the elements is one thing, but for the voice assistant to work properly it can be a little trickier.
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#163I work on ADA a lot for my company. Please put on some headphones, turn on the voice assistant of your OS, put on some blinders, and run your app or website… no mouse, just keyboard. 1. Democracy is about access; make sure everyone has access to your software. 2. The keyboard allows folks with disabilities and power users to fly through your website/app… that being said… the second a tab is off, the person with a dis…
Yeah unfortunately this seems to be something very few outside of bug tech dedicate resources to. Even for them it seems to be an afterthought, at least in my professional experience. It winds up another compliance checkbox just like security.
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#164The author makes an excellent point. There are too many poor Terminal UIs created just for the sake of having a TUI. Often these are not well constructed or lack sufficient thought to be effective/productive. But the broader trend in GUI apps has been to target marketshare not deliver productivity for keyboard users. Back in the 80s and 90s Photoshop, Illustrator etc. became the powerhouses they are today because the…
Professional and power user software is always keyboard-oriented when it makes sense, I don't see it being ignored. Microsoft even addressed the criticism that Windows was largely not possible to use from keyboard, and massively improved it starting with Win10.
> But the broader trend in GUI apps has been to target marketshare not deliver productivity for keyboard users.
It's not a trend, it's a fallout of Electron being the default choice. Devs that use non-web UI frameworks are aware of keyboard navigation, or at least don't disrupt the builtin thing. And of course what devs that don't target power users tend to do is irrelevant to GUI vs TUI debate in the context of power users.
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
you are arguing against a strawman. Most reasonable people want support for both keyboard and mouse-based navigation. For example, why did Edge and possible chrome, remove support for Back via the backspace key? Literally, why remove something that exists and that some people might use? Same with some web forms where hitting enter in a text box does nothing. I expect it to submit a form, but very often, it does nothi…
> For example, why did Edge and possible chrome, remove support for Back via the backspace key? Because people were triggering it by accident all the time. Firefox and Safari don't navigate back on backspace either. Enter only auto-submits if there's a visible submit button or if there's just one input, and that behavior goes back as far as I can remember.
right now, i cannot even enable Backspace = go back on Edge. I am forced to use Edge on my work computer and i hate that this feature is gone. Not disabled, just gone.
About enter to auto submit, i've been running into this problem more often where some web frameworks just ignore the Enter key. There is a submit button, but i cannot trigger it via the enter key.
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#166Keyboard accessibility is one of those things that tends to get swept under the rug or forgotten about entirely alongside accessibility in general. The funny thing is that the former usually falls out of the latter. Part of the blame lands on the shoulders of popular UI frameworks (or in the case of those choosing to eschew use of such, the developers who made that choice). The older frameworks tend to make this fair…
It's not even in consideration anymore since the plaque of electron swept over desktop apps.
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#167Co-sign. This is one of the reasons I’ve always loved NetNewsWire as my RSS reader and few things have been able to displace it. Everything is doable by keyboard, and the keyboard commands are extremely logical and intuitive. You can FLY through your backlog.
Excel is the same way. I’ve been an excel power user as well as a Sheets power user and the latter just never managed to enable the level of speedy keyboard navigation Excel could. I can almost work blindfolded in Excel.
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#168I work on ADA a lot for my company. Please put on some headphones, turn on the voice assistant of your OS, put on some blinders, and run your app or website… no mouse, just keyboard. 1. Democracy is about access; make sure everyone has access to your software. 2. The keyboard allows folks with disabilities and power users to fly through your website/app… that being said… the second a tab is off, the person with a dis…
[deleted]
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#169Power user experience is not the same thing as user experience in general. If you want to make the argument that all developer tooling should be keyboard-driven, fine, be my guest. But most people aren't willing to deal with the learning curve of keyboard-driven GUIs, and that's okay. We shouldn't force it. HN's insistence on acting like all users are Arch Linux efficiency perfectionist hacker types is painfully corn…
you are arguing against a strawman. Most reasonable people want support for both keyboard and mouse-based navigation. For example, why did Edge and possible chrome, remove support for Back via the backspace key? Literally, why remove something that exists and that some people might use? Same with some web forms where hitting enter in a text box does nothing. I expect it to submit a form, but very often, it does nothi…
> For example, why did Edge and possible chrome, remove support for Back via the backspace key? Literally, why remove something that exists and that some people might use?
Because web pages don't preserve element focus well, web was originally meant for documents in the first place, not UIs. If you're trying to erase a character and the focus has been lost, you go back in history instead. It's a real existing problem in poorly designed pages, not a nefarious plot to annoy power users by Google, Microsoft, or Mozilla. It was always janky as hell.
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#170Power user experience is not the same thing as user experience in general. If you want to make the argument that all developer tooling should be keyboard-driven, fine, be my guest. But most people aren't willing to deal with the learning curve of keyboard-driven GUIs, and that's okay. We shouldn't force it. HN's insistence on acting like all users are Arch Linux efficiency perfectionist hacker types is painfully corn…
Where this falls apart is commercial software. The issue is we use off-the-shelf frameworks and tools for commercial software. And then we don't train developers on how to write high-volume software.
Commercial software is THE power user use case. Your users will be using your software 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for years. And still, the software is obtuse point-and-click garbage. Meanwhile commercial software from 25 years ago could be navigated at light speed.
That's part of the reason Excel can't be dethroned. Excel is from the old age of software, and that means that users can input and navigate at light speed. All these fancy tools claim to dethrone Excel, but when you actually use them you realize it's a goo goo ga ga Fisher Price level UI. Extreme amounts of whitespace, buttons hidden behind submenus of submenus (which you have to navigate by eye, by the way!), features stripped, UI constantly shuffling around between updates.
Look, that works fine for a website on the open web where you assume your users have never touched a computer before. That does not work for commercial software.