GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 710941
GtkLabel "selectable" activates "can_focus"
Last modified: 2018-04-15 00:36:05 UTC
I don't know if this is a bug, but it seems like if you make a GtkLabel "selectable", it enables "can_focus". I can sort of understand why this might be useful, but IMO, it's not the best thing to do as a default behaviour. For example in GtkMessageDialog, the message area labels are set "selectable" in .ui file but they also set "can-focus" to false. It's kind of weird in GtkMessageDialog to allow tabbing focus onto the labels, but it's definitively useful to have them selectable (ex. copying error message into search engine).
The basic premise here is that if some functionality is useful to have, it should be accessible with a keyboard as well as with the mouse.
I think it's not as useful of a premise when applied specifically to tab-focus on labels, it seems people expect tabbing around a dialog will only land on widgets that accept input or are otherwise activate-able (ex. link label). I personally don't care, since I use the mouse for this stuff usually, I just made the bug report because apparently people that use the keyboard find it annoying. We have a bug report on Mousepad for it: https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2396
(In reply to comment #2) [...] > I personally don't care, since I use the mouse for this stuff usually, I just > made the bug report because apparently people that use the keyboard find it > annoying. We have a bug report on Mousepad for it: I think this is a good point. Accessibility is something we take seriously overall in GNOME It's important to not be ourselves impaired by this, i.e. it should be possible to easily create accessible apps, but that should not prevent people from using GTK+ to creating apps with keynav that actually makes sense. Only a hand full of GTK+ applications are GNOME apps after all.
We're moving to gitlab! As part of this move, we are moving bugs to NEEDINFO if they haven't seen activity in more than a year. If this issue is still important to you and still relevant with GTK+ 3.22 or master, please reopen it and we will migrate it to gitlab.
As announced a while ago, we are migrating to gitlab, and bugs that haven't seen activity in the last year or so will be not be migrated, but closed out in bugzilla. If this bug is still relevant to you, you can open a new issue describing the symptoms and how to reproduce it with gtk 3.22.x or master in gitlab: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/issues/new