Re: perpendicular split pane control (3 panes: 1 vertical, 2 horizontal)

Bringing in my voiceover experience, we adjust the splitter with the 
keyboard.  It does not tell us much except that we are moving it up or down 
or left or right depending on the orientation of the splitter.  most of us 
prefer in mail that the preview splitter close the preview to take it off 
the scren.  one reason for this is that as we keyboard our way through 
message lists, each message touched turns to read which we do not want. 
anothe rreason is that many of us feel that having the preview of the 
message on the screen is too much clutter and not worth the sacrifice of 
having to press enter to open a message which results from removing it.

I hope this helps some.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gregory J. Rosmaita" <oedipus@hicom.net>
To: <wai-xtech@w3.org>
Cc: "Becky Gibson" <gibsonb@us.ibm.com>; "Tim Boland" 
<frederick.boland@nist.gov>
Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2008 9:48 AM
Subject: perpendicular split pane control (3 panes: 1 vertical, 2 
horizontal)



at yesterday's ARIA workgroup call, we discussed the issue of "Split Pane
control implementation"

at first, split pane control was addressed as a binary choice:

1. expand/contract left-right, or
2. expand/contract up-down

i observed that in GUI systems, applications, such as GUI FTP managers,
email clients, calendaring software, authoring tools, etc. often have 2
splits - one vertical and another horizontal

al gilman noted that on the mac side of things, that this situation is
part of the default presentation of applemail -- the left bar has
folders,
the top segment of the right column is unfoldable, the bottom pane splits
horizontally into a preview and message list -- noting that this
presented
a viable use case for 3 heirarchies

al elaborated on the applemail example:

     the top thing is not unfoldable. It is a preview pane. The folder
     listing appears in the top big part of the right hand column, the
     preview pane contains the preview of message;  It is clear that
     it is dividing the width into two columns. The second is
     splitting the right hand column into an upper and lower part

when asked by RichS if i as a blind user would prefer direct control of
the split pane or have the pane delimiters included in the tab order, i
replied that in the ideal world, i would leave it to the user to choose --

for some it will be easier to accomplish resizing panes with direct
control, but some users may prefer or require the resizing widgets to be
in the tab navigation order...  in the real world, however, direct
control/acces to the slider outside of normal navigation order is
probably the best solution...  i asked if this was something which should
be addressed at the DHTML call today, and so the decision was made to use
slider for split pane control at the moment, but to discuss the
ramifications of perpendicular resizing and possible keyboard
implementation thereof with the DHTML group...

al noted that if we aren't careful, an application may end up pointing at
3 things with selection of the first container, and so it was decided to
add this as an issue for the upcoming PF face2face meetings in venice,
after soliciting the opinions of the DHTML group

as al summed up the state of the spliter proposal -- one can use slider,
but what does that mean in terms of keyboard navigation, placement,
etc.

would it be possible to discuss this at today's meeting?

thank you and apologies for the short notice,
gregory.

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             Gregory J. Rosmaita, oedipus@hicom.net
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Received on Tuesday, 12 February 2008 15:22:46 UTC