modifier-only shortcuts

[Olaf Jan Schmidt]

[ Thomas Zander ]
> > 4) the only problem with two modifiers is if you were thinking pressing
> > e.g. ctrl+shift+a and then changed your mind before pressing 3d key - I
> > occasionly get into that situation - in this case I have to press it
> > again to switch back to my original layout - but this is not special -
> > I occasionly get into similar situation by holding Shift for 8 secs
> > thinking :)

Why don't you simply switch these keyboard gestures off in the dialogue that 
appears? This is a single click.

> So, basically you are saying that since something else is broken its OK to
> add another broken thing? I Hope not!

The accessibility keyboard gestures are not 'broken'. They are supported by 
Windows, Mac OS X, GNOME and KDE, and they are part of a soon-to-be-released 
standard by the Free Standards Group.

> The 'holding shift' was something else that the usability team convinced
> KDE to disable by default.

I hope you are wrong, because I do not remember the usability team ever to 
have made a request on the HCI list to disable this by default. I only 
remember developers asking to disable it by default on kde-core-devel. The 
accessibility team replied with the following suggestion (which was accepted 
without objections): The gestures are active by default, but will be 
automatically disabled in kpersonalizer unless a checkbox is set (so that 
they can be used in kpersonalizer and do not annoy later). On distributions 
that remove kpersonalizer, they can be easily switched off the first time 
they are invoked.

And while I agree with your evaluation of the khtml accesskey problem, please 
keep in mind that the accessibility team has no objections to changing it. We 
just didn't want to make this change during string freeze, we don't want to 
change it in a minor release, and we first want to have a convincing solution 
by the usability team how to migrate existing accesskey users to a different 
shortcut. Simply ranting about our work being 'broken' is not a constructive 
contribution.

Olaf

-- 
Olaf Jan Schmidt, KDE Accessibility co-maintainer, open standards 
accessibility networker, Protestant theology student and webmaster of 
http://accessibility.kde.org/ and http://www.amen-online.de/