On Mon, 2005-09-19 at 22:51 +0100, Alan Horkan wrote: > On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, David Zulaica wrote: > > > Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 11:57:24 -0700 > > From: David Zulaica <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > To: 'Matthew Thomas' <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, > > 'Usability gnome conference' <[email protected]> > > > Subject: RE: [Usability] Indicating required fields > > > The required fields could have a different color border. > > Subject [ ] (required) > > It is ugly but it is accessible and unambiguous. > Colour alone is not likely to be enough. > > I'd be happy enough with the star like what you see on the web as it would > meet common user expectations, principle of least astonishment.
Color alone will be problematic in the long run. Already now, Clearlooks puts a blue (well, selection color) border around focused text entries. That's really nice, and it's visually distinguishable regardless of your color perception abilities. And it really doesn't matter whether screen readers can see the effect, because users of screen readers are interacting with software in a fundamentally different way. The focus indicator is meaningless to them. But now if we start using border colors for other things, we could run into problems. Especially if all our code is doing is saying "make the border red". First, there's the problems of what colors to use. You need to avoid using a color that's similar to the selection color so as not to conflict with the focus ring. And we could quickly run into a situation where 20 different programs are using 20 different sets of colors. We color-blind folks would sit back and laugh as even the rest of you got confused. ;-) This is not to say that applying border or background colors to text entries and other controls can't be a nice additional affect. But I'd far prefer things were done in a nice semantic way. So as a programmer, I'd call: gtk_entry_set_is_required (entry, TRUE); Then maybe the theme puts a border around it, or maybe a background color. Or maybe it sticks a little marker inside the box, like so: Subject: [ * ] And yes, of course we'd want to standardize the behavior across themes. We don't want to have FAQs saying "the fields with a diamond are required", and users saying "diamonds huh? I see some yellow fields though." But here's what this approach gets us: 1) If a color accent is used, it is provided by the theme, meaning it won't conflict with the selection color. Unless the theme designer is dumb. 2) Visual indicators be damned. People using screen readers don't hear "this entry is red". They hear "this entry is required". 3) There is one, and only one, correct way to mark your entries required. And it's not a suggestion buried away in a design document nobody reads. It's in the API, right there in front of you. We get consistency. -- Shaun _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
