[libreoffice-accessibility] Re: [Libreoffice] [PATCH] vcl: Printing UI "page range" autofocus

Hi Maxime,

On Mon, 2011-10-24 at 14:52 +0200, Christophe Strobbe wrote:
> At 06:50 22-10-2011, Maxim Iorsh wrote:
> > When the user selects "Pages" radio button in the Range section, it is very
> > reasonable to expect that she would now want to specify the range. Thus moving
> > the focus automatically to the page range edit box would save the user a mouse
> > click.

        Which looks nice ! :-)

> Unrequested focus changes that are not announced in advance are not 
> good practice for accessibility reasons.

        Unfortunately, I suspect Christophe is right, so - presumably we need
to do this in a slightly more cunning fashion (ditto for the PDF case).
I wonder what ways those could be - personally I love the easier to use,
more ergonomic UI change you suggest - and surely it'd help improve life
for impaired people too if they could find out about it.

        The tab navigation ordering is already somewhat strange in the print
dialog with the "Print in reverse page order" appearing in the chain
before the radio buttons above it - which might be worth fixing too.

On Mon, 2011-10-24 at 14:52 +0200, Christophe Strobbe wrote:
> 1. When a screen reader user (typically a blind user) encounters a 
> set of radio buttons, the only way to find out what the buttons are, 
> is going through them with the up/down arrow.
 
        Surely the screen reader knows these are part of a radio button group
and has relations it can use to read out the options ?

> 2. Keyboard users (not only blind users) move through dialogs like 
> the Print dialog with the Tab key and the Shift+Tab key. The latter 
> is for navigating backwards. With this patch, what happens when the 
> user presses Shift+Tab from the Page Range field in order to move 
> back to the radio buttons ?
 
        It works fine; you go from the entry back to the Pages button (which is
already selected so we don't get a new selection event) and then you can
use up and down arrows.

> Does the focus immediately get pushed back 
> to the edit field, making backwards navigation impossible?
 
        So no, this is fine, but good to check.

        For what it is worth the current situation for a blind user tabbing
through that dialog is pretty horrible too - the 'tab' goes from 'All
Pages' to the 'Pages' entry field (which is not insensitive when the
Page range thing is unselected), and so on.

         So - IMHO, if the Pages entry (which we auto-focus) has a suitable
label (saying 'Page range') that a screen reader can read, and we handle
insensitivity better there - we already made the UI rather better for
the impaired. More ideally, if we can clobber the up/down arrow on the
keyboard to move to previous / next radio button in the group we improve
things all around - right ? [ and fixing the tab chain looks like it
would be nice too - but I'm not clear on the APIs for doing that - is it
really just the order of instantiation of the widgets in
vcl/source/window/printdlg.cxx eg. ? ].

        How does that sound ? and thanks Maxim for caring enough to improve
these rough edges ! :-)

        All the best,

                Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks@suse.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot


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