[STYLE GUIDE] Spinner revisited

I was about to implement the home and end key behavior described in [1] in 
the Dojo spinner widget.  However, I have some reservation about 
overriding the behavior of the home and end key within an input field. The 
spinner is an input field with associated up and down arrows.  A user can 
click on the arrow to increase/decrease the number value in the input 
field.  With focus in the input field, the user can press the up/down and 
pageup/pagedown keys to increment/decrement the value in the field.  The 
Style guide has home and end keys defined to set the minimum and maximum 
values for the field.  However, home and end are currently used within an 
input field to move the caret to the beginning or end of the field.  Will 
this confuse people?  If I just want to move the caret to the beginning of 
the field, I might be surprised that the minimum value is now entered into 
the field.  This could cause me extra keystrokes if I had pressed the Home 
key to be able to increment the existing value by some increment of 10 by 
typing in an additional character. 

The spinners in Windows use home/end to move within the input field. They 
also do not implement pageup/pagedown to move in larger increments.  What 
do people think, should we override the default behavior of home/end for a 
spinner widget? 

Likewise, I don't believe that we should implement right/left  arrow keys 
to increment/decrement the value since the right and left arrow keys are 
used to move the caret within an input field.  If we override the 
right/left arrow key behavior the user must always use backspace to clear 
the entry if they want to type in a new entry. 

 I don't want to reopen the discussion if we have already contemplated 
these issues. 

thanks,
-becky

[1] http://dev.aol.com/dhtml_style_guide#spinner

Becky Gibson
Web Accessibility Architect
                                                       
IBM Emerging Internet Technologies
5 Technology Park Drive
Westford, MA 01886
Voice: 978 399-6101; t/l 333-6101
Email: gibsonb@us.ibm.com
blog: WebA11y

Received on Monday, 7 July 2008 19:05:57 UTC