Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Changes in the filter GUI

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From: Ulf Lamping <ulf.lamping@xxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2004 20:00:40 +0100
Biot Olivier wrote:

Maybe we can just append a "v" check mark for correct syntax and "x" for
incorrect syntax? Hopefully GTK+ provides stock items for this.

Regards,

Olivier

| From: Guy Harris
| | On Mon, Jan 26, 2004 at 10:34:42AM +0100, Ulf Lamping wrote:
| > Also when editing the filter string field, the background color will
| > become red or green, depending on the correct syntax of the filter
| > string.
| | Do those two colors look like different shades of gray to people who | have red/green or full color blindness? (Or is the loss of | the hint for
| those people not worth the effort of worry about it?)
| | (No, I'm not color blind myself, but it might be worth thinking about
| when designing UI features.  Note that the GNOME HIG mentions this:
|
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/usabilityprinciples.html#acc
essibility

"Accessibility means enabling people with disabilities of some kind to
participate in life's activities: in this case, specifically to use your
software. For example:

   o  Color-blind users may not be able to use your application if you
      rely only on color-coding to distinguish different types of
      information"

although, in this case, it's not distinguishing different types of
information, it's only providing a hint whose loss probably isn't fatal
- after all, it was arguably not really a hint to people using that
feature before the message to which I'm replying arrived, as I noticed
the background coloring but had no clue what it was telling me.)

Hmmm, after thinking about this, I would tend to the following:

Adding additional widgets for indicating syntax (ok/fail) will reduce the screen space for *all* users, so this might not be preferable.

As it's really only a hint (maybe a useful one), I think it's ok to do it the way I implemented it.

It seems to be not quite obivious what the colors are all about, I added tooltips to explain the behaviour and checked that in.

It might be an idea to only turn the color to red if the syntax is wrong, and using the default color if syntax is ok.
This might help color blind people as well (at least a bit).

Any comments?

Regards, ULFL