GNOME 3.0 release delayed

Posted Jul 31, 2010 16:32 UTC (Sat) by SEMW (guest, #52697)
In reply to: GNOME 3.0 release delayed by haydn
Parent article: GNOME 3.0 release delayed

The button order on OK/Cancel dialogues is quite clearly an arbitrary convention -- whichever one you are used to will seem right, whichever one you aren't will seem wrong. MacOS and Gnome have standardised on one convention; KDE and Windows have standardised on the other.

So your implication that the Gnome/MacOS convention is somehow objectively the wrong, and less accessible, one is just not true (or, at least, unsubstantiated). For Gnome to switch to the other convention now would be the real accessibility fail, since that would break with the convention that their users are used to.

If that's your primary evidence that it's "broken by design", they would seem to be doing pretty well...

GNOME 3.0 release delayed

Posted Aug 2, 2010 10:45 UTC (Mon) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (2 responses)

>The button order on OK/Cancel dialogues is quite clearly an arbitrary convention

There is a tiny bit more to it than that - in English-speaking cultures, questions requiring a binary answer are 'yes or no', not 'no or yes', so having the 'no' button first creates some minor cognitive dissonance.

GNOME 3.0 release delayed

Posted Aug 2, 2010 11:50 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (1 responses)

HIG doesn't just toss up yes/no buttons and simply changing the order wouldn't meet the guidelines. It is a little more detailed than that.

http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/

GNOME 3.0 release delayed

Posted Aug 2, 2010 16:09 UTC (Mon) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

Whatever you say, mister literal.