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

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 11:01 PM, Eben Eliason <eben.eliason at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > 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...)
>


I agree with you that we need to consider future needs of the student
as well. Just out of curiosity, I decided to take a look at the manual
of Sharif Linux (a Farsi GNU/Linux distribution) and judging from the
screenshots, they seem to use non Latin-alphabet accelerators. So it
may be a good idea to have the accelerators translateable and leave it
to the language teams to decide what they want.

Thanks,
Sayamindu


> - 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]
> >
>
>



-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]