- From: Dr Geoffrey Kantaris <egk10@cam.ac.uk>
- Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2004 13:13:52 -0000
- To: <www-amaya@w3c.org>
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