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

[Level 1]

On Sunday 16 December 2007 12:58:52 panel-devel-request at kde.org wrote:
> Message: 4
> Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2007 13:10:16 -0700
> From: "Aaron J. Seigo" <aseigo at kde.org>
> Subject: Re: [Panel-devel] Kickoff should require click to change tabs
> To: panel-devel at kde.org
> Message-ID: <200712161310.16824.aseigo at kde.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> On Sunday 16 December 2007, Sebastian Sauer wrote:
> > Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > > On Saturday 15 December 2007, James Smith wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > > 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


Just as long as its a configuration option I'm happy.  I think that we should 
consider two things, firstly that new users are going to be confused, and 
more substantially that the way the tabs are arranged makes searching very 
annoying.  I wish kickoff would disable hover-over-tabs when a search is 
active, because otherwise the search is absolutely useless. You can't move 
the mouse in to select a search result without moving over the tab  bar (the 
tab bar stands between the k-button and the search results).  Right now, if I 
recall correctly, you can't select items using the keyboard; and anyway I'm 
in the habit of selecting things with the mouse.

If I had designed kickoff I would have put the tabs vertically on the right 
side.  As it is now, kickoff either needs to provide an option to disable 
hover-on-tab or it needs to intellegently disable hover-on-tab when a search 
is active; ideally, it would disable hover-on-tab if the mouse is entering 
from the bottom, but re-enable if 1) the mouse hovers more more than a second 
or so; 2) if the mouse is coming from the content area and moving down into 
the tab bar.