Re: Shortcut combinations WinXP 9Pre4

Re. Dave Woolley's comments (below) about certain shortcuts encouraging bad 
habits: Shortcuts are about accessibility, especially for people who have 
difficulty using a mouse, but also for everyone who prefers speed over 
pointing and clicking. As I understood it, what was being proposed was that 
users should have the choice between the current very full shortcut schema 
for Amaya and a familiar "Open Office-style" schema, and that this choice 
would be available from within the user interface. I agree that having a 
font dialogue (currently under Characters in the Tools pane) encourages a 
bad habit -- much better to encourage proper use of stylesheets -- but in 
that case why have support for in-line font styles at all? Having it and 
then making it difficult for people with disabilities to use seems 
contradictory to me (there is no current way of accessing the Tools pane 
with a keyboard, let alone the Characters tab).
    Does using Ctrl-b for strong and Ctrl-i for emphasis encourage false 
associations with bold and italics? The associations are already there in 
the way virtually all text-based browsers (not least Amaya itself) present 
strong and emphasis on screen. When you're typing, you want a quick and 
familiar way to emphasize things, and Ctrl-b and Ctrl-i are what most people 
use, and they know what the results will be of pressing those keys (even 
Dreamweaver uses these shortcuts for strong and emphasis). Not using these 
shortcuts just makes Amaya unintuitive and slow, and also reduces 
accessibility. (I'll bet most users who aren't web designers don't know what 
"strong" means and would be totally confused having to look for it buried in 
the menu system.)
    Geoffrey

----- Original Message ----- 
Sent: Wednesday, December 15, 2004 6:20 PM
Subject: RE: Shortcut combinations WinXP 9Pre4


> From: Dr Geoffrey Kantaris [SMTP:egk10@cam.ac.uk]
>
> CTRL+SHIFT+P
> Change the font size
> CTRL+B
> Apply bold formatting (this should do <strong>..</strong>)
>
I think these are examples of short cuts that ought not to be in Amaya.  The

first one encourages bad habits, and the second one makes a false
association
between strong and bold, at least for English speakers.  There are several
other similar ones.

-- 
David Woolley

Received on Thursday, 16 December 2004 13:14:00 UTC