Keyboard Navigation for GNOME 2.0 (Draft)
Contents > General Notes
Conflicting Mnemonics
Gtk suffers from a general mnemonic access problem in that if two controls
in the same context share the same mnemonic (which is occasionally unavoidable
even with careful design), pressing Alt+that character will focus or activate
one of those controls immediately-- and the user can't tell which one it
will be.
The correct behaviour here should probably be that found on MS Windows:
repeatedly pressing Alt+that character cycles focus through each of the
affected controls in turn, without activating them (in the case of buttons),
so you can still navigate to the correct one.
Status at 8-Jan-02: This behaviour seems to be implemented and
working in dialogs, haven't had a chance to check it in menus yet.
Activating Controls
Where there is no ambiguity, MS Windows
often allows Spacebar to be used as an alternative to Enter to activate
controls, whereas Java normally only allows the use of Enter. In
this proposal, only "Enter" is generally recommended as the "make it so"
key, except where you might reasonably expect it to do something else instead.
In controls that accept the tab character
as input, and also in containter-type widgets where the Tab key navigates
between controls within that container, Ctrl+Tab (and Shift+Ctrl+Tab) are
recommended instead of Tab and Shift+Tab for navigating out of that widget/container.
Unfortunately, Sawfish has recently adopted
Ctrl+Tab as its default window-cycling shortcut (and the adoption of Ctrl
as the default Sawfish modifier also breaks a bunch of other things)...
this is now the subject of
Sawfish
bug #8220, and sounds like it's going to be fixed fairly soon.
Status at 8-Jan-02: The Sawfish bug has been fixed, leaving us free
to use Ctrl-Tab for keynav purposes.
