Access keys

[Gunnar Schmi Dt]

Hello,

On Donnerstag, 29. März 2007, Ellen Reitmayr wrote:
> On Thursday 29 March 2007 11:14, Krzysztof Lichota wrote:
> > Ellen Reitmayr napisał(a):
> > > Olaf and me also had a look at access keys and would love to see the
> > > following changes:
> > >
> > > Initialisation: Alt-Shift-Space instead of Ctrl
> > > Direct call of a (known) access key: Alt-Shift-<key>
> >
> > Please keep in mind that right Alt is used in Polish keyboard layout
> > to enter Polish letters (with Shift to make capital letters), so it
> > should be limited to left Alt only. I hope no keyboard layout uses
> > left alt with shift :)

I suppose with "right Alt" you mean the key labled something like "Alt Gr" 
(at least on German Keyboards). From a programming point of view that key 
is different from the "left Alt" key (which is simply called "Alt").

In German Keyboard layouts, the "Alt Gr"-key is used for entering 
characters as "@" (used in email addresses) or "€" (the Euro sign).

> oh!
>
> but alt-space opens the window menu under Windows and Gnome. we can't
> use that one.

I suppose we have a misunderstanding here. The suggestion was not to use 
Alt-<key>, but to use "left Alt"-Shift-<key>, i.e., "right Alt (i.e., Alt 
Gr)"-Shift-<key> should not be used for access keys.

If we really want to see a problem with mixing the "Alt" and "Alt Gr" keys, 
we have to answer the following questions:

* Are there keyboards which do not have an "Alt" key?
* If there are keyboards that do not have an "Alt Gr" key, how often is 
the "Alt" key reconfigured to behave like an "Alt Gr" key (so that in fact 
the "Alt" modifier is missing in the configuration)?
* How often is the "Alt" key reconfigured to behave like a second "Alt Gr" 
key on keyboards that do have both an "Alt" and an "Alt Gr" key?

* Do we want our solution to work for the users with keyboards in the above 
scenarios?

Gunnar Schmi Dt
-- 
Co-maintainer of the KDE Accessibility Project
Maintainer of the kdeaccessibility package
http://accessibility.kde.org/
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-core-devel/attachments/20070329/de4fa9d9/attachment.sig>