Live data from Hacker News

GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

ckardaris.com

501–507 of 507 posts

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#501

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

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

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 #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

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

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

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.
Post reply on HN