331–340 of 513 posts
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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.
I guess that team was dismantled some time ago, with no on carrying the flag anymore. Modern windows is impossible to work on using just keyboard. Some mods & extensions do help. But the native experience is abysmal.
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Devil's advocate: showing the relevant keyboard shortcuts in the UI can be overwhelming (or at least one of many parts that all together become overwhelming) to new users, while not having them shown at all makes them undiscoverable. I think this is a bad reason. Even MS Office has made this work. But I've seen people act on this type of argument. If nothing else, it should be possible to have a settings menu where y…
> showing the relevant keyboard shortcuts in the UI can be overwhelming Every application did it for decades after the first Xerox guidelines up until Microsoft and Apple decided to retire the concept of usability some time around 2010.
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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.
It should have been Ctrl-Backspace or something.
- New *G*ame - *S*ettings - *Q*uit
Ideally keys should be centered around an area of the keyboard and not just the first letter.
I 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…
This is something that we have been working on in our app, but to be honest: it is hard. At first we wanted to be completely keyboard centric, but we had to pivot away from it. There is so much to learn in this space. There are small things, like dropping a 'jump to main content anchor' before the navigation so you don't have to tab through the top navigation everytime. But there are also certain pages en layouts whi…
I ended up stuck on my back, bed-bound in 2005, with a keyboard on my thighs. Using OSX (probably Tiger) and mostly native apps it was possible to get by with just the keyboard. It was the only platform that I could use without a pointer and I was hardly pushing boundaries.
These days just doing simple things like setting up a computer for the first time, I often can't be arsed with a mouse, or I am in places where there isn't room to use a mouse. I have to resort sometimes to a trackball out of necessity, but it's always a hassle and I frequently hit brick walls. Simple file managers can be nightmare enough. I remember just trying to navigate to a taskbar on some desktops being impossible. I couldn't get to something like the network manager applet. Thankfully there's a CLI for that now.
On the flip side, I also love the idea that you can do most things with a simple pointer.
I was trying Batocera linux recently on a laptop, the touchpad wasn't recognised, it's a gamepad driven OS (I think a layer on retro-arch), and navigating with a gamepad (once you RTM and figure it out) is actually quite nice. Kodi, has always been a bit of a faff on the keyboard, and that works well with the gamepad. Kodi was born on the Xbox so this of course should be a given. The UI for me with a keyboard has always been a bit clumsy.
For example, in Firefox, trying to save a file when a file by that name already exists, you get a "Cancel" or "Replace" prompt and you can "Cancel" by pressing return, but if you want to "Replace", you apparently HAVE to use mouse or trackpad!?!
When a software is created for the terminal, it can expect the users to know these certain shortcuts. But this cannot be assured for GUI.
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I had to keep accessibility in mind a lot in my previous job (web development for a university). The thing that I consistently found was that, the more accessible a website was, the better the experience for everyone , not just people with disabilities.
That's because at the end of the day: - accessibility is just usability. all it is is making sure your product is as usable by as many people as possible. - it's a myth that "people with disabilities" are some other that excludes you, and 'accessibility' or assistive technologies only benefits other people . Everyone is only temporarily 'abled'. You need to use prescription glasses to comfortable read a computer scre…
Not always. There are things that increase usability for fully abled people but decrease it for disabled people. Color-coding is a common one. Another is using smaller font size to make more info visible at once, or advanced touch gestures that can be accidentally triggered by shaky hands.
Then there are accessibility features that actively harm fully abled users, like sticky keys or screen readers that automatically follow focused UI elements.
I just prefer TUIs, I think if you prefer GUIs you should very much use them and ask for more of them, but if you prefer TUIs please do use those too. I could go into all the reasons I prefer TUIs but this is a HN comment not a manifesto.
Please just use and develop what you prefer.