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GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

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Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#501

Post by mhb »

apothegm wrote: post #495
sdeframond wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Baby strollers are not accounted for enough ! One might wonder (wrongly) why everyone should care about the special and expensive needs of a few (or old) people when designing public spaces. But a majority will actually need to use these spaces with a baby stroller. Not a few. Baby strollers are a driving power of our society! Enable them!

Not to mention luggage. I find it hard to believe that it’s a coincidence that rolling luggage became common shortly after curb cuts and wheelchair ramps did.

Really? Both strollers and wheels on luggage are pretty nice to have even if you have to somehow negotiate curbs. So, I think it is a coincidence.

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#502

Post by Shebanator »

rootedbox wrote: post #152

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…

Couldn't agree more. Using a screen reader is an incredible learning experience, and it really teaches you just how extraordinary people can be: its incredibly difficult to get anything done. And then there are the people with motor disabilities, the deaf, and on and on.

I got interested in accessibility some 30 years ago, when I got to visit the lab at University of Washington. Its unbelievable the progress that has been made. And AI is having a huge positive impact as well.

I'll also say that if you can get a chance to go to a place like a google accessibility lab for a demo or even better watch a live usability test with disabled users, do it!

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#503

Post by my-huge-pony »

sdeframond wrote: post #455
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true in other fields too. Wheel-chair ramps are used by people with baby strollers. Subtitles work for deaf people, those who can't understand the spoken language, or simple folks in situations where someone is sleeping next to them. Pretty much every accessibility-oriented feature ends up helping out people beyond the original audience.

Baby strollers are not accounted for enough ! One might wonder (wrongly) why everyone should care about the special and expensive needs of a few (or old) people when designing public spaces. But a majority will actually need to use these spaces with a baby stroller. Not a few. Baby strollers are a driving power of our society! Enable them!

In fact, in a way, basically everyone will use a baby stroller at some point in their life (at least as a passenger).

I personally never noticed this before becoming a parent, but there's a lot of spaces that are "almost" stroller friendly, but for some reason there is a small obstacle that would not be expensive to remove (if accounted for during planning). For example, a few steps that could easily be a ramp, blocks of flats with a lift that is accessible after ascending a few steps, even high shop entrances.

For me it's not a problem, because I can easily carry stroller with a baby inside up, but for most mothers I know this is usually a huge or unsurmountable obstacle.

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#504

Post by burnte »

ChickeNES wrote: post #274
burnte wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot think of a single reason these would be disabled by default other than Apple stubbornness.

This is the company that popularized the mouse and GUIs, why are you shocked?

Because it's stupid. Why would accessibility features enabled by default on Windows and Linux be disabled by default in MacOS? There is literally zero advantage to disabling it, and it makes life harder on users.

Same thing with tap to click. Once everyone else enabled tap to click Apple disabled it. They just HAVE to be different, even if it's bad for users, and that stubbornness is frustrating.

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#505

Post by joe_the_user »

manlymuppet wrote: post #56

Power 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…

I don't know where you got "forcing" here. The author is arguing for guis that give the option of keyboard use. Unless you think having hot keys underlined nonconsensually imposes visual complexity and confusion on the hapless non-power-user, I don't see where your argument makes sense here.

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#506

Post by Eji1700 »

chrisjj wrote: post #491
Eji1700 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh I think things like vimium have kinda solved this. Push a button, every icon is now labeled with a key, type that key, counts as a click, done. I get that this does NOT solve for say, someone who's blind (i guess you could announce them, not sure), but it is easy enough I've found even lower tech people are fine with it. As always, a lot of the trick is communicating the interface and using modern standards, not "…

> Push a button, every icon is now labeled with a key, type that key, counts as a click, done. So, omits the text-labelled buttons?

No? I’d say just test or YouTube how it works. Its a bad explanation

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#507

Post by inigyou »

rootedbox wrote: post #152

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…

How do you square this with YAGNI? A lot of development time can be wasted making something disabled-accessible that will never have a disabled user.

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#508

Post by jameshart »

wolvoleo wrote: post #329
jameshart wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not requiring a mouse isn’t a magic pathway to ‘accessibility’ though. The fact that something can be used with a keyboard does not obviate developers from the need to consider other aspects of accessibility.

Also: when I copy paste out of an application I don’t want a bunch of spurious chrome glyphs and newlines - copying just the text contents of a TUI scrollable text field isn’t trivial and isn’t always guaranteed to work

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#509

Post by jameshart »

miki123211 wrote: post #387
jameshart wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's very hard to make a TUI (or a web app) that has 0 screen reader accessibility. It's also much harder to make a TUI that has great screen reader accessibility (it's much easier for web apps). "native" apps are a much wider spectrum. With a TUI or a web app, screen readers will always have some access, because no matter what you do, the text layer is always there. This may not be enough accessibility to use the ap…

I’m specifically talking about native apps. iOS apps built using UiKit are going to have first class accessibility support.

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#510

Post by jameshart »

Xirdus wrote: post #342
jameshart wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's TUI and there's CLI. TUI has always been poor man's GUI, back in the day it was even literally called GUI. CLI on the other hand has zero similarities with GUI. You write the command and the command executes and that's it. Writing commands is inherently the most accessible form of controlling computers, second only to dedicated single-purpose buttons that don't mesh well with this whole "general purpose compu…

Yes, but this article is about TUIs
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