Length of the document formatting dialog

[feerrenrut]

Feedback on GUI, received via email, with respect to the Document formatting dialog.

The document formatting dialog is a very long dialog. may wish to consider a bit of a column layout with two columns of options after the first one which is longer and would sit on its own line. the other checkboxes could be grouped in different groups that make sense? just a thought.

[feerrenrut]

I tend to agree that this dialog looks a bit off. Having a large list of checkbox options makes them hard to find. Some suggestions (not necessarily all compatible) I can think of for this would be:

• to group similar options EG (font name, font size, font attributes and line numbers, line indentation, line spacing and table stuff) but split these up into multiple columns as already suggested.
• try a multi list dialog (as used for instance in some IDEs). Enabled options are in one list, disabled options in another. The lists are allow you to type the first few characters of the item you are looking for. Pressing space toggles the option between lists. There are buttons in between the two lists for 'Enable All', 'Enable selected / Disable selected', 'Disable all'. Honestly I tend to think this looks a little ugly, but its fairly effective. This could perhaps be made more attractive by getting rid of the buttons.
• Use grouped checkboxes, but have a section that shows those that are enabled, and allows you to disable them.

See also: http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/23142/what-do-you-do-when-you-have-too-many-choices-in-a-checkbox-field-set

[jcsteh]

Yeah, this dialog really is quite horrible. For all of the check boxes in the form "Report x" (e.g. "Report font name"), I was thinking a scrollable list with checkable items might be better, except we could drop the "Report" prefix. However, there are two problems with this:

1. While wx does have checkable list controls, they aren't accessible. However, I think we might be able to come up with a way we could subclass it to fix this.
2. It means you can't get to the options with the existing accelerators and users have come to depend on these for quick changes. For example, "Report table row/column headers" is alt+e (because alt+t is already taken), but in a list, you can only type from the start. I guess we could implement our own key handling logic, but if we did this, the accelerators would not be discoverable.

[nishimotz]

Sometimes these items are inaccessible visually. see #6186

[feerrenrut]

In order to provide a quick and easy (and non disruptive) fix, the following is suggested:

• Add some text at the start to describe dialog and what it does.
• Try grouping similar options. Consider the difficulty of adding new options to these groups.
• Make sure that the dialog can scroll if required.
• Add text (at end of dialog) for "Announce formatting changes after the cursor" to describe what this does and move "Announce..." option below this, with a new shorter label.

[feerrenrut]

I propose grouping the items in the following way:

Font

• font name
• font size
• font attributes
• emphasis
• style
• colors
• alignment

Document information

• comments
• editor revisions
• spelling errors

Pages and spacing

• pages
• line numbers
• line indentation
• paragraph indentation
• line spacing

Table Information

• tables
• table row/column headers
• table cell coordinates

Document features

• headings
• links
• lists
• block quotes
• landmarks
• frames
• if clickable

[feerrenrut]

The following text could be added to the start of the dialog to give some more context.

The following options control the level of detail for document formatting reported by NVDA.

[jcsteh]

I think alignment should be under Pages and spacing rather than Font.

Regarding the dialog caption, rather than "level of detail", maybe this?

The following options control the types of document formatting reported by NVDA.

[jcsteh]

Some additional things to consider:

• I'm happy with the group names except for "Document features". If we can't come up with another name, I think I'd even prefer just "Other" or something. I don't want it to seem like "Document features" is an NVDA "concept".
• We can rename "if clickable" to just "clickable".
• If we do have the group names, we can probably drop the "table" prefix from "cell coordinates" and "row/column headers".

[derekriemer]

Some names.

Document control

report element specificity

Element types

Also note that report comments is now one of them. and there's an open
ticket for report graphics that should go here.

On 9/19/2016 11:21 PM, James Teh wrote:

Some additional things to consider:

• I'm happy with the group names except for "Document features". If
  we can't come up with another name, I think I'd even prefer just
  "Other" or something. I don't want it to seem like "Document
  features" is an NVDA "concept".
• We can rename "if clickable" to just "clickable".
• If we do have the group names, we can probably drop the "table"
  prefix from "cell coordinates" and "row/column headers".

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