Mouseless Software
My laptop finally arrived, and now I’m reminded how much it sucks to have a laptop. In particular, the horrifying pointing device and (relatively) unergonomic keyboard. This has brought back all the ideas I had years ago about ways to go without a mouse and ease typing on the keyboard without re-engineering the UI.
A few of them are:
- Using the Active Accessibility API, allow the user for focus/click UI elements by typing a substring of their name, typing a chord, or using the keyboard to perform a binary search of the screen until you land on the element you want, ala Jordan Sissel’s keynav
- keynav’s logic could be improved by using the Active Accessibility API to partition the screen segments not by pixel area, but by control density, further reducing the keystrokes required to activate a particular control
- Using a Quicksilver-like metaphor to expose files/apps/folders/emails/etc in a unified collection accessible by ad-hoc abbreviations
- Using activation sequences for the above functionalities that are based on chords of home row keys and not hard-to-reach modifiers like Control and Alt. For example, it should be possible to intercept the simultaneous pressing of A, S, D, and F, as distinguished from normal typing.
- Scrolling by drumming fingers along the home row keys rather than using a scrolling device. Repeatedly drumming ASDF might scroll down, while :LKJ would scroll up. Shift could control slow or fast scroll speed.
I would also note that I’ve been playing with the information the AA API exposes using AccExplorer from the SDK. I was pissed off to discover that both GMail and Outlook Web Access basically break accessibility. In both cases, what seems like a hyperlink to a mouse user (as indicated by the ‘finger’ icon when mousing over an email subject) is in fact just text with some Javascript attached to it, so the accessibility API has no way of knowing that you can ‘click’ these ‘links’. Lame.
Sure, you can use the vanilla HTML version of both, but then they suck even more.
God, I’m glad I’m not blind!