What are the biggest barriers to learning to operate Windows® by keyboard?
Impediments to using the keyboard interface include: • Focus indicators are hard to see. Efficient use of the keyboard interface depends on the user’s ability to immediately spot the focus. There are many different focus indicators in Windows®. Some are barely visible: • The focus indicator for a push-button is a faint dotted line around the perimeter of the button. • When a drop-down menu is selected but not yet opened, it looks almost the same as adjacent menus that do not have focus. In some situations, the only way to determine which object has focus is through deduction. For example, in some GUI web-browsers, the page itself has focus when the text in the address box is not selected and the insertion point in the address box is invisible. There are even situations when the focus indicator is completely invisible. For example, there is no visual indication whatsoever when a user moves the keyboard focus to the taskbar. • The rules that govern the operation of the keyboard interface
