Looking for a suggestion – or point to existing
functionality that I’ve missed. We are a couple version behind in Toolkit, so
upgrading to be current is a possibility.
What we would like is a keyboard (accessible) way for the
user to conveniently navigate from one pane to a desired pane.
The application has multiple docking panes – some pinned,
some un-pinned – some with tabs to additional content, some with splitters into
sub-panes, etc.
See example picture here with a green dot on each pane that a
user might choose. Some of these panes are always visible; some come and go
depending upon what “document” is open.
Obviously, the user can click the mouse into the panes and
then use arrow or tab to move up and down, left and right, or whatever
depending upon what that pane content does. That’s not the problem.
With many businesses and governments now, you have to meet
certain requirements for a person with a possible disability to use the
product. Such requirements usually include the need to navigate without using
the mouse.
My first thought was simply to have a hot-key (F-Key or
control) to iterate through them one by one, but that seems cumbersome when
there can be so many.
My second thought was that a hotkey would pop up a menu of
open panes and allow the user to select that way. Or even to have the list maintained
on a ribbon submenu – like the Windows/ Window List dropdown. Either of those
requires some either having the panes register and deregister themselves or to
use discovery to know what panes are open. The problem with the latter is that
we may not have good names underneath that we would have to correct. (I don’t know
off the top of my head.)
Another thought is to make something more visually interactive
like the pane/drag assist you get when moving docking panes. Something that
would simply highlight the panes one at a time and allow the user to hit enter
to drop into that one.
Of course, desired is the ability to add this
functionality without having to rewrite all the code!
So who has an idea or something you may have implemented
yourself that you might share?
Thanks.
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