I have an NSTextView subclass which is tied to an NSTableView. They are tied together and look like this:
{mono}
+===============+
| |Nam<cur> | |
| |
| +- - - - - -+ |
| | Name 1 | |
| | Name 2 | |
| | Namibia | |
| | | |
| +- - - - - -+ |
+===============+
{mono}
The text view behaves like a token field, but without a menu.
1. When the user enters characters, it narrows down the contents of the table view.
2. When the user presses the down/up arrows, the selection in the table view changes, while the cursor doesn’t move in the text view.
3. When the user has selected a row in the table view and presses Return, the text fragment in the the text view is replaced with a token representing the selected item and the table view is refilled with all the options.
This all works fine for sighted users, but is pretty broken in VO. Here’s what a VO user currently has to do:
1. User enters characters, but gets no feedback that there are items that have matched in the table view.
2. When the user presses the down arrow, the VO cursor moves to the table view, meaning the user can’t enter anything else without returning to the text view.
2b. If the user instead does VO-Shift-down to interact with the text view, then up and down result in “Top of document” and “Bottom of document” instead of moving the cursor in the table view.
3. To select a matched item, the user must move to the table view, interact with it, select a row and press Return. At this point, the user gets no feedback that the item has been tokenized and added to the text view.
What I’d like is something akin to how VO works in the Spotlight menu, or the Mail search field. Granted, both of those are menu-based, so perhaps not quite the same thing. But they do have the “leave the cursor in the field, but let the user select other
items which get read out to them with up/down” that we’re looking for. I’d like to avoid using a menu since the number of items in the table view could be many hundreds. This whole control group is in an NSPopover.
Is there a paradigm I'm missing that would retain the ease of use for sighted users but make this control group more transparent to VO users? Or should this work as-is, and I'm simply not using the VO tools in the right way to make this UI accessible?
Thanks in advance for your thoughts,
-Nick
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