Bread Crums From Kbd, Accessibility Feedback

[vtatila]

Hi,
The new bread crums feature in Xplorer Lite is cool, however, as a screen reader user it is not keyboard usable. Further more, adding it in the tab order would make the order much too long. sometimes it would be very nice to see just the folders and be able to navigate based on them, though. I can happily jump back and forth with alt+left/right, and Xplorer recalls the focused item even, unlike Explorer, but there's still no bread crums equivalent on the keyboard.

Howabout letting ctrl+left/right navigate dir components in the address bar directly, like the combo navigates words in a text editor and URl segments in browsers. Pressing shift+enter could then show the menu based on the address bar cursor position, equivalently to r-clicking the bread crum component. This is assuming the full path is displayed, of course. As a screen reader user, bread crums would be a fine way to make navigation faster and minimize hitting items other than folders.

As background info, I'm using Windows via synthetic speech which is mostly tracking the keyboard focus, plus a hugely full-screen magnified view. The reason that made me dump Explorer totally was Xplorer's smart keyboard focus handling and extension searching. In fact, I wish it could recall the last focused item in each and every folder, even across Xplorer sessions. Also, I never felt really at home in Xplorer before having disabled the second pane and started relying on tabs in stead. The reason: more panes increase visual complexity given my very small magnified viewport, and I can read only one item at a time, since the current point of focus is what's spoken. It is very hard to quickly get an idea of what's selected, thus I prefer to work in ctrl/shift+selected increments that can be managed mentally, rather than maintain a hugely complex selection. But hey, that's just me, I like the fact that xplorer is customizable enough to suit my style of working.

[nikos]

like all toolbars, this breadcrumb is not very keyboard friendly, especially if you use it in popup (sub)menu style. Your best bet is to find a keyboard way to move the mouse pointer around

[vtatila]

Hi,
Thanks for your input, great to get a prompt reply just in time. In theory, augmenting the keyboard interface to reach the mouse operated crum bar is doable. EIther with the Windows mouse keys. Or using screen reader specifics, a special mode letting me freely roam the screeen, called virtual focus, plus its actions for L and R mouse clicks.

In practice, however, using the WIndows mouse keys is too slow or me magnified and the same is true of the virtual focus with speech, I'm afraid. I'll have to switch to a special mode, cursor around the screen, interact with the controls and go back. By the time I've done that, I could have flown through the history with alt+let/right and used home in a listing sorted by type to start examining the folders in the desired level. That's why I initially suggested the ability to launch the crum popup from the address bar cursor position, with a special hotkey, to do this even faster. Normally there's nothing wrong with toolbars not being keyboard accessible, since there are nicely mnemonic hierarchical menus and hotkeys that one can use, in stead.

BTW: would be nice if I could have a view that only showed folders or only files, to make viewing subdirs or listing only files in the current dir even easier. With such a mode on, I could browse neighboring folders almost as fast as the crums, without having to worry about redundantly listening to files with speech, despite my current sort settings, whatever they may be.

I do realize I'm in the minority here. Adding even more hotkeys for the address bar might make it too complex use oerall. Xplorer 2 is already loaded with shortcuts, I don't recall half as many as I should.