On 10 Feb 2006, at 12:31, Bill Haneman wrote:
Anyhow, the less stuff we make "special" to accessibility, the better. If something really requires a timeout, then the timeout should be configurable. In many cases, the better solution is not to use a timeout at all.
Just to play devil's advocate, does something as long as 2 minutes (I forget if that's how long it is in GNOME, but it is in OS X) really count as a "timeout" in the conventional sense? It's fairly obvious why things that disappear after a second or two are bad for accessibility, but if it takes any user 2 minutes to read and react to what should be a reasonably simple alert box, then we're failing them big time anyway, and we have more important accessibility issues to address to put that right.
(I guess there's always the scenario where the user might return to their keyboard to find their cat has triggered the shutdown and there's only 5 seconds left to cancel it, but at that point it's a race against time for any user-- the 5 second threshold may just be a bit more or less depending on how they have to read and react to the dialog.)
Cheeri, Calum. -- CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer Sun Microsystems Ireland mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Java Desktop System Team http://blogs.sun.com/calum +353 1 819 9771 Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
