ain't no way my mom is learning vim
Read the article. The argument is not "GUIs should require keyboard navigation", it's "everything should be possible with the keyboard".
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GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
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Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#12Keyboard 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 fairly easy; for example, in Cocoa/AppKit (Mac native UI framework), one can pretty easily wire up their entire UI for proper keyboard navigation entirely visually (mostly just consists of connecting nextKeyView outlet between controls to produce a logical chain to tab-focus through). Defining key shortcuts is also simple; add a menu item for a command and set its corresponding shortcut (which in turn allows the user to rebind the shortcut in System Settings at will).
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.
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#13I agree but I think being usable by the keyboard isn't enough, because the shortcuts are often hard to discover and remember. I think the ideal is - like good TUIs - GUIs should put obvious hints on screen how to navigate via keyboard.
It would be really great to have some GUI frameworks for the common platforms (including web!) designed to do this and have some opinions on common shortcuts for common actions so we can standardize on something.
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#14The one UI invention many web UIs now add is the universal command search bar. I’m most familiar from it from Jetbrains IDEs where it’s been for over a decade and it is a remarkable upgrade on browsing menus. With the KeyPromoter extension on I even learned the keyboard shortcut over time. Good UI pattern and now this universal command search is everywhere: Cloudflare, Mercury, etc. Love it.
Similarly, under macOS in most apps ⌘⇧/ opens a full menubar search which can surface most app functionality from the keyboard. Not quite as good as a command palette but close, and devs don't need to do anything to opt in except populate the app's menus properly.
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#15Keyboard 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…
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
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#16I've been on this kick for a long time. A few years ago I was exploring a UI design tool that was entirely keyboard-driven, using pneumonic keychords inspired by Vim: https://github.com/danielvaughn/stride
My experience is that while it's awesome to have really deep keyboard-driven experience, it can't _only_ be that. You need some graphical controls to help guide users.
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#17I have seen more GUIs these days that don't support even the bare minimum of using tab to cycle through various fields and selector buttons. Which as I recall was introduced in like windows 3.0.
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#18I have seen more GUIs these days that don't support even the bare minimum of using tab to cycle through various fields and selector buttons. Which as I recall was introduced in like windows 3.0.
Or page up/down.
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#19Keyboard 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…
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
As a system macOS definitely has some holes in keyboard navigation, as well as a couple corners which are KB-navigable but the way to focus them is not immediately obvious.
On the app level, keyboard navigability depends on the developer. If they take the time to dot their I's and cross their T's it's between decent and great, but if they don't care it'll be bad.
Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven
#20People gave the ribbon interface a lot of shit but one thing they definitely got right was making absolutely every option reachable from some keyboard shortcut. Some of the shortcuts get a little long but you can just add those as a hotkey if you use them a lot.