Sadly, even interfaces that do support keyboard navigation tend to implement it poorly. Microsoft Office is probably the gold standard here, almost everything can be navigated using mnemonics, all keypresses are buffered and the user seldom needs more than 5 presses to get anywhere.
GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
321–330 of 513 posts
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#322> In fact, many GUI framework application guidelines explicitly encourage GUI application developers Instead they should be engineered in a way that allows users to bypass those developers in a (at least) framework-consistent way as there will never be a time when they collectively become "keyboard-wise".
In some cases they do. For example a GTK app main context menu can be triggered with F10. But this relies on the developer to correctly "tag" said context menu. In simple cases it is obvious what to do, but in more complicated designs, where you may be able to achieve the same visual output in different ways, it may not be so obvious. In that case, it is up to the developer as well to read and try to follow the publi…
So in none of the cases they do - it shouldn't depend on any tags, that's the whole point of bypassing the app devs!
(not that the tags shouldn't exist, they can make customization easier, just that they shouldn't be necessary for any framework menu components)
What complicated designs do you have in mind?
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#323So it's the opposite of smartphone, where keyboards are UI driven
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Democracy is not about mob rule, it's about a dialog. No my friend, Democracy is majority rule, which easily turns into a ruling mob. It has nothing whatsoever to do with dialog. Also, your quote of Lincoln's address is taken completely out of context. He was talking about his opposition of the ideas of a faction of Democrats who were in favor of slavery and his support of the majority of Republicans who believed s…
Classics are still there, at least they were for me. Then again, i didnt have the pleasure of experiencing American public education. As much as i do agree, overtime language does eventually change but it can happen over our dead bodies
> language does eventually change
Exactly, words do not carry their root's connotations as a permanent tax. 'idiot' used to mean "a layman, someone not holding office or lacking skill', or "a person not interested in politics"; 'nice' comes from Latin 'nescius', which meant "ignorant"; 'cretin' meant "Christian".
Democracy is not mob rule, and the Greeks agreed. They had a separate word for mob rule: 'ochlocracy'. Having two words means the Greeks did not treat them as identical. Plato and Aristotle argued democracy tends toward it, but they still have not treated it for a definition.
Bringing Plato here is kind of weird: The Republic is an anti-democratic aristocrat's argument, written by a man whose teacher was executed by an Athenian jury. Plato was born into the Athenian elite. His mother's family gave Athens tyrants whose regime killed something like 2000 citizens in less than a year. Plato initially was invited to join, he considered it, and pulled back when he saw what they did. He was part of anti-democratic coup. Citing him here for the word definition, is like citing Marx for the only definition of 'capitalism' - not exactly inaccurate, and might be even exactly correct, yet the context and connotation still matters - Plato took neutral-to-positive word and gave it a hostile reading, while Marx haven't even talked about 'capitalism' (he had "kapitalistische produktionsweise"), the actual term as we know it was popularized later.
'democracy' aside, "make accessible to all" is a long-established dictionary sense of 'democratize', it was never a Silicon Valley invention. And you're right - "representative democracy" only took hold in the late 1700s. The term's meaning moved after Plato. If democracy could shift from Plato's warning label to a thing Hamilton endorsed, 'democratize' could shift too.
I implore you, good sire (@robomartin), to unsaddle your high horse and let the language take its course - if people and times decide to give words different meaning, it most likely will happen anyway.
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#325Keyboard 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…
> That sort of design has fallen out of favor with newer frameworks, unfortunately. The new preferred style seems to be a wireframe that the dev chooses which parts fill in, and often only the barest of essentials makes the cut.
This is even more visible when using Apple’s own apps on macOS. Choose any of them that have been ported from iOS without any attention to detail or any QA for accessibility, like Reminders or Settings or Notes or another app. The tab key will not take you where you might expect. There is no way to navigate only using common keyboard shortcuts. Nobody working on all these Apple apps have heard of tab order or keyboard based navigation.
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
yep, the curb cut effect is a well-researched and documented phenomenon [0] across ADA development in all aspects of the world. accessibility work isn't just about making things possible for folks with disabilities, it's about making things better for everyone . [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curb_cut_effect
Another way to think of this is that everybody occasionally needs to do something unusual. But some people, due to their life circumstances, always need to do something unusual. And making things better for the always-odd folk is also a positive to the occasionally-odd folk. Which like, we're all eventually gonna be odd folk! That's what age does to us. But we should understand these accommodations as being a net pos…
Yep. In accessibility research, they call these "situational disabilities". When you need to open a door with your arms full of groceries, you aren't so different from someone who is never able to open a door. Accommodations that help people with permanent disabilities also help other people in the right situations, too.
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny that you bring macOS, because for _decades_ I've struggled with navigating it without a keyboard. Windows components however, especially old ones, are incredibly accessible
> Windows components however, especially old ones, are incredibly accessible Bing, Bing, Bing! I came here to vent how the new windows 10 and windows 11 interfaces (made by Mac enthusiasts, ughh) have omitted keyboard accessibility for a cleaner look. They also dropped drag and drop support (which I never knew about in windows 7) and I completely missed how useful it could be on Windows 10/11.
Tons of built in winui3 stuff is still very accessible by the keyboard, metro era though what pretty rough.
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#328ALT+TAB, TAB, ↓, ↓, ↓, CTRL+HOME.
For a lot of people this is a recognizable pattern. Switch window, select element, scroll down, then snap back to the very top. The keyboard commands above should do the same thing no matter if it's your text editor or your web browser. People should know these are going to work regardless of what they're using. Because these aren't key commands going to the program, these are key commands going to the operating system. The program shouldn't be able to arbitrarily choose whether it abides by these. Consistency is important not only for speed, but for human understanding and capability. If every door had a different way of opening it such as drawing a series of lines or tapping a certain rhythm or belching thirty feet away people would be mentally taxed discovering that particular door's interfacing method, and common tools would not be able to help those who couldn't find the interface or use it because of disability or differing ability. It's only doors with extremely specialized designs like blast doors that have an unusual interface and interfacing method, because they're designed to do one very specific thing that lies far outside of common use cases. Your chatroom program, image viewer, or archive unpacker is not a blast door. Put a door handle on it where everyone expects it to be.
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#329I 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…
In the context of discussing TUI vs GUI (as the article does), the accessibility and keyboard control balance probably swings very strongly to native GUIs; in a TUI you’re at the whim of the TUI framework’s stabs at accessibility support, while on a full fledged native UI you have all the bells and whistles of focus management and text to speech and voice control and high contrast and magnification and motion adjustm…
> The idea that it must be more accessible because it’s confined to a mono space typeface and communicates state mostly by changing the foreground and background color of the text it renders makes no sense to me.
That's not why. It's because TUI apps have to be designed around the strong possibility that a mouse isn't even available.
Also in a TUI you never ever have that issue that some text isn't copy/pastable like some dialogue boxes, in which case the screen reader might have issues picking it up too.
And in a TUI you don't have to deal with that window management crap. Moving stuff around because something else is on top. Everything happens within that little square.
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked on Microsoft’s Windows QA team long ago. My team used to have “No-mouse Tuesdays”: you were supposed to do all your normal work but only using the keyboard.
What I wouldn't give to work for a company that actually cares about QA.
Which is not Microsoft. Maybe back in that day but today no. It's more Quality Assumption now :)