Hi, I just wanted to let you know about a tool I've developed for automatically generating keyboard accelerators as used in menus and dialog texts.
I value keyboard accelerators because I don't like using the mouse (it slows me down), and I know that some people prefer accelerators because they find the hand/eye coordination required to use a mouse too difficult. The tool is called Accelerator and is available here: http://www.qtrac.eu/accelerator.html I wrote it using C++/Qt4 but the job it does is not platform or tool-specific and it is v. easy to compile. (On say, Fedora, you need the qt4-devel package; which I guess is qt4-dev on deb based distros.) Naturally humans can add accelerators manually (and may produce more aethetically pleasing choices), but the program does has the advantage of being easy to use and for longer menus can save some puzzling. The algorithm can also be tuned to work very fast (but potentially producing sub-optimal results)---this might be useful for dynamic menus. Anyway, if you try it out I hope you find it useful. -- Mark Summerfield, Qtrac Ltd., www.qtrac.eu _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list Usability@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
