Marney Beard's Weblog

Tuesday June 15, 2004

I love the keyboard

For my first-ever blog posting, I decided to sing the praises of driving a desktop UI from the keyboard.

At work, I live in either the Java Desktop System (Sun's Linux/Solaris desktop based on GNOME) or Windows XP. I use my Fujitsu laptop almost exclusively. As much as possible, I operate using the keyboard instead of a mouse (or trackpad, trackpoint, or other pointing device). I'ml a big fan.

It's faster for me: I don't bounce my right hand between mouse and keyboard, and now that I've learned some conventions and gained some motor skill, I can get to what I want much more accurately by whacking the keys than by pushing the pointer around, especially with the somewhat finicky devices on laptops.

It feels much more balanced between my two hands: When I use a mouse a lot, my right hand sometimes gives me faint hints of strain.

Using the keyboard is a constant reminder of a fundamental requirement for accessible applications (apps that can be used by people with disabilities): It must be possible to use every feature of the UI without a pointing device. This accommodates not only people like me who have only trivial limitations in the use of their fingers and wrists, but also people who just can't use a mouse -- either because they can't control it accurately, or because they can't see the pointer on the screen no matter how good their dexterity is.

On the not-so-hot side:

- It's taken me a while to learn the keyboard conventions that I use. You don't build muscle memory in an afternoon.

- Once your fingers DO know what to do without your thinking about it, you're up a small creek when you use a different keyboard layout. My old Sony laptop has the left-side FN and CTRL keys reversed relative to my Fujitsu, and it takes a real effort to switch from one to the other.

- Some apps don't follow the conventions. As far as I can tell, Acrobat Reader 5 on Linux seems never to have heard of the keyboard (and if you know otherwise, please send email to marney.beard@sun.com to set me straight). On my iMac at home, though the Apple apps themselves are getting much better, other apps seem to think that PointAndClick is endless fun.

- Some apps don't have a good visual indication of focus, occasionally making it hard to see where you are.

Still, I'm sticking with the old keyboard. Every time I discover a new function for which I used to need the mouse, I'm happy. (Today I learned that ctrl-t opens a new tab in Mozilla 1.7, at least on Linux; this is useful to me for at least two reasons that I won't bore you with.)

For information about GNOME keynav, see the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines.

Also look at the Java Look and Feel Guidelines, and find keyboard info in the TOC on the left.

I don't happen to have Windows keyboard information readily at hand, but you can find it easily enough. (2004-06-15 09:04:22.0) Permalink