Status Putting together notes from Heikki's accessibility bugs

Keyboard

• Tab: Sidebar to Mini-cal to Summary to 1st field of the Detail view through all Detail view fields back to Sidebar
• Up and Down arrows
  • scrolls through collections in the Sidebar and circles back to the top
  • scrolls up and down dates or weeks in the mini-calendar and moves onto to the next month
  • scrolls through items in the Summary table view pane and circles back to the top
  • scrolls through items in the Summary calendar view and doesn't circle back to the top
• Left and Right arrows
  • scrolls right and left dates in the mini-calendar and moves onto the next row or month
  • mini-calendar should scroll to next month once the user reaches the end of the month
  • scrolls through column headers in the main cal and circles back to week view in the same week
• Enter
  • scrolls through collections in the Sidebar and circles back to the top
  • scrolls through items in the Summary pane and circles back to the top
  • jumps to the next field in the detail view and gets stuck in the notes field
• + key activates the checkbox in the sidebar

Comments

Philippe - 06/08/05

Specified Keyboard behaviors

I'm confused : since the Sidebar never has the focus, how can tab move from it from Sidebar to Minical?

Same thing for enter.

Add that shift-Tab navigates to the previous area (inverse of tab).

Beyond accessibility

Keyboard use is a great way to improve the productivity of an application. This is actually one of the way a desktop app differentiates itself from a Web App (where everything is click driven).

Basically, I think that typing any key any time anywhere should "do something" so that to provide accelerated access to functionalities. e.g.:

• Type text when not in a edit mode: navigate to the next item in the focused list (summary or sidebar) that begins with the typed letter. In the summary view, use the column that's used for sort (grid behavior?). In the Calendar view, use the event title.
• Type text when in a edit mode: edit the text field

Also modifier keys are a great way to improve user's productivity (see PhotoShop^? for a great example). Menu accelerators are a classic (and required) one of course but we can think of others. e.g.:

• Shift (or fn) arrow keys: go one "page" up (up arrow) or down (down arrow) or to the top of the list (left arrow) or bottom (right arrow)
• Shift tab: navigates to the previous tabbed element
• Cmd / Ctrl - Delete: will do "Remove" (avoiding the warning dialog that the simple Delete key would trigger)
• Shift - Cmd / Ctrl - Delete: will do "Delete (Move to Trash)" (avoiding the warning dialog that the simple Delete key would trigger)

There's certainly others we can think about. Those key combination are not very important for accessibility and can be hard to discover but they can really improve the productivity of a skilled Chandler user and will be appreciated by power users.

Menus

We should have accelerators for more actions (like Sync, Print, Help, ...).

We have Sync in both File and Collection menus. I understand why (global vs. specific to the selected collection) but I think it's confusing. I'd vote for a top section in the Collection menu that would apply globaly (like Sync all).