[Kde-accessibility] HIG says no colon in front of combo boxes and line edits?

[Heiko Tietze]

Hi Alexander,

to be honest I'm never sure whether or not to use a colon. So this advice intends to unify the interface. All pages were discussed at the guidelines mailinglist (CC). And obviously we made a mistake here. The colon makes sense for external captions not only as part of a sentence but also in order to be accessible for screen readers (might not be true for Orca/Simon - CC'ing kde-accessibility). Therefore it is explicitly demanded for group boxes [1], for instance.

*  Use the group label to explain the purpose of the group, not how to make the selection. End each label with a colon.

And I not only missed the colon for combo boxes but referred to it falsely. My fault and many thanks for your attention. I double checked the other pages and found the same mistake for drop down, list view, and dual list [2,3,4]. And the reason is that I copied the text from radio button and check box where labels truly must no have a colon. 

To cut a long story short, I changed the affected pages (anticipating acceptance) to

* End each label with a colon.

Thanks again for carefully reading the HIG. Please report any conspicuous statements you will find. There might be some more undesired easter eggs.

Cheers,
Heiko.

[1] https://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Usability/HIG/Labels

[2] https://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Usability/HIG/DropDown
[3] https://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Usability/HIG/ListView
[4] https://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Usability/HIG/DualList

Am 27.05.2015 02:52:33, schrieb Alexander Potashev:
> Hi,
> 
> I came across labels for combo boxes without colon at the end in some
> applications, e.g. in Krita 2.9.x. In my opinion a colon is necessary
> in front of a combo box because the label plus a combo box item almost
> never make a full sentence, and to break the "sentence" in parts we
> use a colon. What I call a full sentence is for example "Set the
> interval of updates to [...] minutes", while "Update interval (in
> minutes): 15" and even "Update Interval: 15 minutes" are not full
> sentences. Just try to read it as a whole without the colon "Update
> interval 15 minutes" - not very good, right?
> 
> But the HIG document [1] at KDE TechBase says "Do not use ending
> punctuation (neither dot nor colon) for caption". According to page
> history this part was written by Heiko Tietze (in CC), but I could not
> find relevant discussions in KDE mailing lists. This makes me think
> the information from Techbase page [1] (and related) could be only a
> draft version of HIG. There are actually more unclear or questionable
> statements at https://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Usability/HIG/*
> 
> What shall I do, edit the HIG on Techbase or live without colons?
> 
> [1] https://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Usability/HIG/Combo_Box
> 
> -- 
> Alexander Potashev



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