Keyboard Layouts, everywhere!

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/08/27 10:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/08/27/8898859.aspx


I have been pointing to the website that has Windows keyboard layouts:

http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/keyboards.mspx

on it for some time.

Now this is a great site, you may have seen it before:

http://www.trigeminal.com/images/KeyboardLayoutInfo01.png

Though it is not perfect.

One big problem is has is actually described right there on the page.

Do you see it?

Here, I'll emphasize it:

http://www.trigeminal.com/images/KeyboardLayoutInfo02.png

Now you can see I'm running in FireFox here. That is kind of all I do now.

Staring after a bizarre incident with an IE plug-in that hung IE7 dozens of times a day.

I decided to live with it and be a good little serf and only gave up after the first time a 75% done blog was basically lost.

I uninstalled IE7 and put in FireFox right after.

Mostly a great experience, though the experience with Windows keyboard layouts was really less than ideal.

Here, I'll show you:

http://www.trigeminal.com/images/KeyboardLayoutInfo03.png

So would you class this as an usability problem or an accessibility problem? :-)

We found a web developer to fix it up but that didn't work out, so finally we decided to just do it all ourselves.

After a bit of work we migrated everything to the GoGlobal site I have mentioned a few times before today until we were all set, and now it is live at

http://msdn.microsoft.com/goglobal/en-us/bb964651.aspx

Exciting?

You can even shrink it way down to:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/bb964651.aspx

if you want. and now you get to this exciting new site:

http://www.trigeminal.com/images/KeyboardLayoutInfo04.png

and that site works everywhere.

In FireFox:

http://www.trigeminal.com/images/KeyboardLayoutInfo05.png

and in Safari:

http://www.trigeminal.com/images/KeyboardLayoutInfo06.png

and in Opera:

http://www.trigeminal.com/images/KeyboardLayoutInfo07.png

and of course in Internet Explorer:

http://www.trigeminal.com/images/KeyboardLayoutInfo08.png

All of the bugs that had been plaguing these various browsers previously, including:

are all fixed now on this exciting new page on GoGlobal!

Of course now I can once again use the page in my default browser and get good results.

There is still one more thing to do and we'll be taking care of that soon.

But in the meantime, enjoy this new page on GoGlobal, today. :-)

 

No sponsors needed for this blog; I did this one pro bono....


Tom Gewecke on 27 Aug 2008 6:22 PM:

Thanks!  I often view these layouts for making Mac versions to help people used to Windows keyboards, but only Opera would work in the past.

Abhishek on 29 Aug 2008 9:11 AM:

That's awesome Michael! While I was surprised that you use FF instead of IE, it does make sense, doesn't it? Hopefully IE8 will do far a better job...

Anyway, the KB layouts look beautiful in FF, except for one bug. Click either the Right Alt or Control buttons, and then mouseover the other unselected one. The flicker's to be seen to be believed. Can something be done re. this please?


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