Re: <Form><input type="file" value !="browse" />?

On Wed, 12 Mar 2003, Jonathan Chetwynd wrote:

> It is the nature of our user group, people with severe learning
> difficulties that they need individual or personal solutions.

That means _user agent_ tuning, does it not? If you used a site-specific
solution that makes the button text "Find" on your site, people would then
be even more confused on all other pages, which are displayed using
"Browse", or whatever the user agent shows by default.

> Browse is not an easy word to read in English, find and look are
> arguably easier.

Well, English is one of 6,000 or so languages, and it is admittedly common
even in contexts where it shouldn't, such as user interfaces of Web
browsers used by people who don't know English well. But "browse"
is hardly among the key problems here.

> further, browse has a laid back, relaxed meaning(similar to meander)
> whereas find look and search are probably perceived as more proactive.

I don't quite understand all the polysyllabic words there, but
a) the word "Browse" (or whatever) is surely among the least difficult
   features in the implementation of file input
b) words like "Find" or "Search" already have _two_ common meanings
   in Web surfing, namely searching for a string within a page (as
   per a user agent's functionality) and searching for a string
   within a site or the Web in general (as per a search form processed
   by a server side script); do we really need a third usage for
   further confusion?

> of greater concern is the reality that many of our users cannot read,
> and would benefit from an associated image.

Maybe, but then they need to have the user agent tuned to use an image
that they recognize. Using an image as a page-specific way of implementing
browsing for file input selection (assuming it were possible - it probably
will, some day), would alienate all the users who know well their
browser's way of telling that they can invoke some file selection but
cannot figure out what the image means.

> it might seem that this is perverse, but XP and some other OS allow one
> to see thumbnails.

You mean in the file selection dialogue? Fine. But the "Browse" issue is
about getting to such a dialogue in the first place.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Wednesday, 12 March 2003 01:40:08 UTC