GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 162949
change play/pause button to a play toggle button
Last modified: 2010-11-19 22:08:07 UTC
From the mail I wrote to the usability list: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2005-January/msg00020.html Accessibility gets messed up by having the buttons change on click (from play to pause) the way to get around this issue is to have your play button be a toggle button. People understand when the play button toggles down that the way to stop/pause play will be to untoggle the button and the button never changes it's value. I've planned on putting this into HIG recommendations, but I need to catch up with calum for a little discussion before writing it in.
Created attachment 37450 [details] [review] patch I agree with toggle button reasoning. However, I have found that users really do respond well to the pause symbol. I can only speculate as to why this is true: it corresponds to the real world devices that they know, pausing is a positive action rather than negative (un-playing). The attached patch adds two mutually exclusive toggle buttons, one for play, one for pause.
William, what is the effect for the UI? Does it change?
Created attachment 37463 [details] screenshot Yup, the UI changes a bit.
Either the toggle button is in, and the pause icon is out, or we keep things the same way. Having two toggle buttons really acting as radio buttons is dead confusing. I'd rather keep it the same way for now, until this gets thrashed out and tested.
Having some kind of [>/||] icon for the button seems like a good idea. Having the two buttons is probably going to be confusing for people on what to do to pause or play. I'll see if I can find an icon that would be usable, could this patch be reworked for that?
Am I the only one who thinks a toggle button is hideous for this purpose? So, as far as I understand, the UI that we currently have is actually pretty good, but has accessibility issues because we change the purpose of one button "randomly" (play/pause), thereby confusing apps such as gnopernicus. Is it possible to make play/pause two buttons (normal, not toggle) and hide either one depending on state? That should fix the accessibility bug, while still allowing the same UI experience as we have now for other users...
I'm not sold one way or the other. However, I think one can argue that it is easier for the user to immediately ascertain the state of the tool by observing whether the Play button or Pause button is toggled. As opposed to searching for and parsing the "Playing" text in the status bar. As it is now the button indicate the inverse of the playing state. One can argue that this requires a brain cycle to interpret.
FYI: Bug 159824 is open for rhythmbox with a very similar matter.
muine does have play toggle button and I really like it's behaviour. voting for big-play-toggle button
William, any chance to update your patch against the current CVS?
Created attachment 54164 [details] [review] updated patch for HEAD
I can see a problem with a lot of theme where the "hover" look is the same as the released one, meaning that you can't really see whether the button is one way or the other when the mouse is over it.
I've tried it, and not liked it (sorry Jon for the wasted time making the patch). Status quo it will be...
Is this decision still definitive? It looks like it is now official in the HIG that applications should “not change Play to Pause while the clip is playing” [1]. Rhythmbox, for that part, also uses a toggle button. I guess a bit of consistency among GNOME applications would be nice. [1] http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/toolbars-appearance.html.de#toolbars-media