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GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

ckardaris.com

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Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#521

Post by Xirdus »

ckardaris wrote: post #440
Xirdus wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have my opinion on aesthetics of additional ways of repeating information already available by color coding. But to each their own. Other than that, is enabling/disabling any of the aforementioned features ever a question of aesthetics?

For example, opting to not enable high-contrast mode is a question of aesthetics. Arguably reading text would become easier for the user, but they prefer to sacrifice a little of the readability in favor of looks.

I am a little confused about your response. Do you disagree with me that accessibility features often reduce usability, or do you agree with me and just feel like nitpicking? I'm all for nitpicking, but I'd rather keep it separate from the real debate.

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#522

Post by mghackerlady »

Telaneo wrote: post #118
toast0 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> showing the relevant keyboard shortcuts in the UI can be overwhelming Underlining the accelerator key is subtle and shouldn't be overwelming. Keyboard navigation unaware users probably won't even notice.

This works poorly if you intend to localise your application. Great if you don't though.

Even then, English has become the defacto language of computing. Some amount of knowledge of its basic vocab is expected, and many computer related words in other languages are english loanwords.

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#523

Post by Xirdus »

madeofpalk wrote: post #444
Xirdus wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> accessibility is just usability. all it is is making sure your product is as usable by as many people as possible. 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 a…

> Another is using smaller font size to make more info visible at once This doesn't sound very usable to me.

You might be the kind of person who does benefit from accessibility features such as larger font size. On the other hand, I'm not; I can read 10pt font on 100 DPI display just fine, without glasses. I'd rather have an extra column in table view visible without scrolling than larger letters, but for you the tradeoff might be different. That's why it's accessibility and not usability. Usability would be if the bigger font didn't push anything off screen, then of course it's better to make it bigger.

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#524

Post by gjvc »

jnpnj wrote: post #488
gjvc wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

once again, I get to cite the IBM AS/400 CallPath system demonstrated here https://youtu.be/5pY6Xxptp9A?t=2083 which almost brought a tear to at least one viewer's eye

Pretty cool video. I would love to know more about the internal design of the as400 platform and how people thought and designed user interfaces. I can't shake the feeling that these interfaces are so lean they're satisfying. Also, I feel that a lot of interfaces today are wasting resources.

watch the whole video from the beginning! :-)

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#525

Post by gmueckl »

ethin wrote: post #468
gmueckl wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dlangui is so niche that I am amazed to even see it here. DearImGui is intended for thowing together some slap-dash UI widgets for debugging things like interactive rendering. Do Qt built-in widgets have huge problems? Inwould assume that custom widgets invariably do because approximately nobody writes any accessibility handling for them.

> Dlangui is so niche that I am amazed to even see it here. Eh, I'm testing whether I can make it fully accessible, since I happen to like the D language itself. But the UI without my changes is entirely inaccessible. > DearImGui is intended for thowing together some slap-dash UI widgets for debugging things like interactive rendering. That's probably what it's intended for, but people use it for far more than that,…

Thank you for your work in DlangUI. Progress on it has sometimes been so slow that I mistook it for abandoned. It has great ideas as far as its API design goes, but the implementation wasn't very sophisticated yet last time I looked. I think that D deserves to have its own mature UI library and DlangUI is probably still the front runner.

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#527

Post by tuna74 »

duskdozer wrote: post #390
ckardaris wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where using a common framework pays dividends. For example, on the desktop I can disable animations for all GTK applications.

I stopped using GNOME after 3, but there were still quite a few animations in the GNOME core programs despite having the disable animation setting set. I wonder if that's changed.

Yeah, wonder if things have changed in 15 years....

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#528

Post by Xirdus »

mghackerlady wrote: post #517
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nor just shape, so a warning icon + text message.

and, as is being increasingly forgotten, SOUND QUES. Seriously, I get they can be annoying but they make navigating and interacting with things so much easier if you can't see them. Sure, TTS exists but is far more inefficient and objectively less helpful in these kinds of circumstances

Another great example of increasing accessibility while reducing usability.

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#529

Post by stymaar »

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…

> Also in a TUI you never ever have that issue that some text isn't copy/pastable

Telle that to Anthropic, as Claude code doesn't let me copy any text from its TUI.

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#530

Post by 1718627440 »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #435
gramie wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

In traffic planning everyone who is not a healthy, athletic, young man without baggage is considered disabled.
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