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Saturday, October 15, 2005

Navigating Between Sheets

After reading Gary's excellent accessibility assessment for KOffice, I'd like to share here one tip of KSpread which may be useful.

Normally you navigate between sheets by using the so-called sheet tab, it sits on the bottom left corner (or right corner, if your sheet is right-to-left). Unfortunately, this might be difficult for low-sighted person as the buttons there are small:

The alternative way is to use the navigational tool bar. This is hidden by default, so go to menu Settings, Toolbars, Navigation and then it will show up:

The buttons in this tool bar can be made large (i.e. in 48 pixels) if necessary.

For mouseless operation, of course this tool bar does not help. But you can use the assigned keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+PageDown for previous sheet and Ctrl+PageUp for next sheet.

4 comments:

Matt said...

Even though this is an accessbility thing and the toolbar is hidden by default, providing a toolbar that duplicates functionality feels like a bad idea.

Though I'm not familiar with the needs of accessibility-dependent users, I'd think the keyboard shortcuts would be preferred.

Ariya Hidayat said...

Matt: keyboard shortcuts only help in the case of mouseless operation, but if the person is also low-sighted than these can't work.

Matt said...

Ariya,
If a person is low-sighted, they don't need to worry about finding buttons at all if they know the keyboard shortcut.

Accessibility is important, but sacrificing general usability for a small gain in accessibility is a bad call.

Ariya Hidayat said...

Matt: thanks for the feedback!

Since I'm neither a11y nor usability expert, this thing surely will get reviewed for next version of KOffice.