[Panel-devel] Kickoff should require click to change tabs

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Sunday 16 December 2007, Sebastian Sauer wrote:
> Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > On Saturday 15 December 2007, James Smith wrote:
> >> Nothing against the way QT repaints and / or feedback happens for Plasma
> >> button elements, but Kickoff should offer a little more tactile
> >> feedback; ie tab changes require a click to bring into effect.
> >
> > why?
>
> to have an action perform (aka switch to the underlying tab) by just
> hovering with the mousepointer over it, does really not sound like the best
> way to deal with accessibility imho.

the accessibility group that would be impracted negatively would be those with 
involuntary motor control. i hope they'd be using the keyboard controls in 
this case anyways since the other targets are so small.

otherwise, from what i understand click interfaces often suck for 
accessibility since it requires even more interaction (move, click) that we 
able bodied people often taken for granted.

honestly, i think the a11y defense is mostly BS. there are two issues i hear:

1) accidental triggering. this is much better in kde4 than what was in kde3's 
kickoff but can still happen. there is no "trough" between the view and the 
buttons so it can be easy to stray into the buttons area. the real fix maybe 
to add such a "dead" zone

2) it feels slower. well, it's not. it's actually faster, at least according 
to the timings i've done.

so we have two reasons that get reported often enough, one of which is 
perception but actually not factual, leaving us with one real issue that 
probably has a real solution.

> Anyway, it was an option in 
> kickoff at KDE3 and with my last commit r749156 we took that option over to
> kickoff at KDE4 :)

i sort of addressed this: do we want to have compat with kickoff at kde3's config 
options? if "but it was in kde3 kickoff" is a valid reason, then every config 
option in kde3 kickoff should be examined for legitimacy and addded.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Trolltech
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