GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 93049
pressing space doesn't scroll the view
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
I was expecting a press on space (in Yelp) to scroll the view, most other apps that view noneditable contents, such as help-pages scroll when space is pressed, not follows possible links to another page. Look at all major web browsers and console pagers.
Well, Space is the key we primarily use and document to activate all buttons, icons etc., so IMHO it would be highly inconsistent not to use Space to activate hyperlinks as well. Although I recognise it's slightly more convenient than reaching for the PgDn key. Any other views, usability folks?
Hi guys, (Disclaimer: maybe the a11y guys are going to dislike this proposal, I'm just throwing it out there.) Peter and Calum, you are both correct after a fashion. Space does scroll most other browsers, and it is also the key which activates widgets in Gnome. The problem with yelp is that focus should, by default, be on the help page, not on a hyperlink (in this case, on the "Index" hyperlink). While focus is on the help page, pressing space should scroll the page. When focus is shifted to a hyperlink, pressing space should activate the link. What do you think? Anna
That's a fair point... and indeed focus used to go to the page rather than the first link by default. However there were two issues with that: - Giving focus to the page is only really useful if you can do something to it, which (prior to the space=scroll suggestion) you couldn't. Help pages don't currently have pop-up menus, for example, which would probably have been the main reason for giving them focus. The other reason would be to make text selections from the page using just using the keyboard, but GtkHTML2 currently doesn't allow that either. - There were technical problems with showing the focus indicator when you scrolled the page... it left some nasty visual artefacts. I forget if we ever found a solution to that... maybe Padraig can refresh our memory.
We did not find a solution which was one reason I was relieved when it was decided that we did not need to give focus to the page.
If focus were on a page using space for scrolling down would not work as it is not defined as a key binding for GtkScrolledWindow. If space were to be used for scrolling down should it work for all GtkScrolledWindows?
I'm guessing it probably wouldn't do any harm to have Space work for all scrolled windows, provided of course the contents of the window got the first opportunity to do something with the keypress before letting it pass through to the GtkScrolledWindow. Nine times out of ten I presume those 'contents' will be icons or list items or something else that will consume the keypress anyway, so there would probably be little noticeable difference overall for the user. That doesn't help with the technical problems though, and I'm still not convinced it's worth changing the current behaviour anyway when there's another perfectly good key that will do the same thing :)