Usability on Mac OSX

Wed, June 6, 2007 — Category: Accessibility

There are some irritating usability problems with Mac OSX that are missing when compared to Linux and Windows.

I find that one of the most annoying things about OSX, both win32 and Linux support that feature…and it’s not only the lack of “focus follows mouse” but also the necessity to click twice to get your action.

For example, a browser window open, but in the background and I want to click a link, I have to click twice: once to focus the browser into the foreground and again to trigger the clicking on the link. Rather annoying.

I did find a few resources for *some* applications that support “focus follows mouse”, but it only appears to work within the application only, not between different applications.

I find the lack of a “tabbing” support in Mac OSX to be rather disturbing as well. I checked the accessibility settings, and there is still no way to force my browser (or other apps) to tab through the interface stopping on objects in the window.

Here are some more resources:

Comments (14)

Don’t Break the Back Button

Wed, May 2, 2007 — Category: Accessibility

Description of the problems associated with breaking the back button in rich web UI. Supporting web standards in whole requires that the page work functionally without javascript enabled.

The adoption of Section 508 accessibility guidelines has been a controversial issue at best. depending on the site involved, and those developing and using it.

Breaking the back button means that traditional browsing with forward and backward buttons will be rendered useless.

Too many times I’ve seen sites that have a rich UI experience, but only tested in one or two browsers (usually IE and FF). As a web developer, I often cringe at sites who have not adopted standard-based DOM scripting techniques, or worse yet throw an error page if I am not using one of their supported browsers, as is the case with Konquerer and weightwatchers.com.

I often bring up my favorite sites on my mobile phone as well. The more popular web sites have started to realize the potential of mobile phone usage and accomodated either with standards-compliant markup and scripting, or offering a dedicated WAP 2.0 site.