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Use Full Keyboard Access in Safari 1.2
Authored by: kupietz on Apr 26, '04 06:29:40AM

If you ask me, this is another example of Apple getting the small things wrong, wrong, wrong. Let's say you tab to a menu and type the first few letters of one of the choices on it. If those letters appear anywhere in the text of the page, suddenly the page jumps to the first occurrence of those letters and selects them... to override this and instead select a menu option that matches those letters, you must first type a down-arrow to open the menu. (At least, *I* have to type a down arrow... other people said that spacebar opens it, but that doesn't work for me.) Then, after the menu is open, you can type a few letters to select your option.

Why should it require the extra keystroke (down-arrow) to access the menu options from the keyboard? Good interface design makes whatever a user is most likely to want to do the easiest thing to do. Did Apple really believe that when you have tabbed to a menu, and you type a few characters, it's more likely that you're trying to leave the menu and find those characters elsewhere than that you want to select a menu option?

I mean, suppose anything is possible, but somehow I doubt that a majority of people who tab to a menu want to leave it rather than select something from it... jumping elsewhere on the page should have been the action that required an extra step, not using the control you have just navigated to.

I know this is system-wide behavior, not just Safari, so consider my point here a system-wide complaint, not just a Safari complaint.

Apple must keep a dedicated think tank of "geniuses" somewhere to crank out cockamamie ideas like the perfectly round mouse, displaying lengths of playlists in iTunes in tenths-of-an-hour ("17 songs, 1.2 hours") instead of the usual hours and minutes, and assigning fewer keystrokes to skipping blithely away from a control you have just tabbed onto than for using it.



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