Mac OS X Form Field Tabbing
In December 2003, I finally took the plunge and started using a dual G5 Macintosh running OS X for my home machine. This machine primarily serves as a video and audio editing workstation, but being a full blown Unix OS under the hood, it comes in handy for evening and weekend software development and system administration work.
As a video editing workstation, the Mac has been a dream. Final Cut Express, even at a paltry 512 Mb of RAM, flies through moderately complex video projects. DVD Studio Pro's MPEG encoding embarasses my earlier Linux-based attempts in both speed and quality. Add to that the fact that I can produce Dolby 5.1 digital audio, and you have an unbeatable platform for amateur DVD production.
In the general use and software development arena, however, I haven't been quite as happy. My biggest frustration has been the fact that web page forms, necessities for web application development, do not support tab stops for all form elements. Or, so I thought...
After installing Firefox to get around what I thought was a problem in Safari, I ran into the same problem again. Select elements and others were skipped in the form tab order. At this point, I suspected either a bug or an oversight and started searching the Internet for others commenting on the same problem.
As it turns out, OS X has a setting in the Keyboard Shortcuts section of the Keyboard and Mouse preferences panel that turns on additional keyboard access. Once checked, Safari allows tabbing to all form fields.
While I'm pleased to have the additional keyboard support, it concerns me that the default does not correspond to the standards. According to the W3C, platforms shouldn't differentiate between different kinds of form elements.
In the mid-1990's, we ran tests to see which style of form completion was faster, keyboard or combination keyboard/mouse. The form in question included a wide variety of text fields, radio controls, check boxes, and combo boxes. The results of the tests showed that the keyboard user could enter anywhere between 2-3 times as much data as the mouse user.
As a result of those tests, we do everything we can to fully enable keyboard use of all of our applications. Right now, we likely have several new OS X users wasting a good deal of time clicking on select boxes when tab doesn't work. While we will definitely get the word out to them on how to fix it, Apple still would be well served to make the default behavior standards compliant.
Posted at 12:00PM Feb 12, 2005 by Jason Koeninger in OS X | Comments[0]