[sugar] [Localization] keyboard bindings for buttons and palettes

[Eben Eliason]

The Indic translation teams (mostly the Indian teams) have
> traditionally kept accelerators unchanged, even if they had the option
> of translating them. I do not know the exact reasons the other teams
> had, but as far as the Bengali team was concerned, the three main
> reasons were
>
> 1. Difficulty in maintaining consistency of keyboard shortcuts
> (different translators used different acclerator for the same menu
> item in different applications, leading to confusion and chaos)
> 2. Lack of native language keyboards (we have very few physical
> "Bengali" keyboards with actual Bengali alphabets on them)
> 3. People are too much used to hitting Ctrl-S to save files - it's a
> habit we decided not to mess with.
>
> I guess 2 and 3 does not apply to the OLPC much.
>

Indeed 2 is not a problem.  As for 3, We have always tried not to mess with
convention much unless doing so provided a considerably better experience.
 With respect to our audience, its true that they won't know the conventions
used everywhere else, but we should weigh  making things slightly more
natural, perhaps, to learn against their having to relearn everything should
they later use a conventional machine/OS.  Learned muscle memory might be
better to have than proper mnemonic shortcuts (I understand I write this
having been spoiled by conventional shortcuts that are, in general,
mnemonic; on the other hand, half of the shortcuts I know in most of the
apps I use are completely  -- at least apparently -- without any meaning...)

- Eben

On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 7:16 PM, Alexander Dupuy <alex.dupuy at mac.com> wrote:
> > Tomeu Vizoso asks:
> >
> > > Users will switch keyboard layouts frequently? Cannot we just
> >  > translate shortcuts to other characters in the cyrillic or arabic
> >  > Layouts so they are used similarly to the latin one?
> >
> >  I'm not talking about switching keyboard layouts (e.g. using
> sugar-control-panel) but rather keyboards where the same keycap has both
> Latin and Cyrillic/Arabic/Nepali/etc. letters - switching between the two
> alphabets is done with the key under Enter that has multiply and divide sign
> in the English layout. Users will mostly work with their native alphabet,
> but will switch to Latin mode occasionally to type foreign names or terms in
> Latin script, e.g. XO, Cambridge, Negroponte, and bilingual users may
> switch for much more extended periods.
> >
> >  At a minimum, accelerators should work in the native script mode (and
> this can be done with localization), but it will be at least mildly annoying
> if you are in Latin mode and none of the accelerators work without first
> pressing the "alternate alphabet" key (and pressing it a second time
> afterwards to go back to Latin mode). That's what I'd like to avoid, but
> which requires extra support - either allowing a second (hidden) accelerator
> code, or having the sugar library understand the keyboard layout and support
> the extra mappings automatically. The latter is more work (and may not be
> practical for non-XO keyboards), but is easier for activity developers and
> localizers, and may be necessary in cases where a SCIM is in use.
> >
> >
> >
> >  @alex
> >  --
> >  mailto:alex.dupuy at mac.com
> >  _______________________________________________
> >  Localization mailing list
> >  Localization at lists.laptop.org
> >  http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/localization
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Sayamindu Dasgupta
> [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/sugar/attachments/20080303/45015449/attachment.htm