Re: Emacs Survey: Toolbars

[Jean Louis]

* Christopher Dimech <dimech@gmx.com> [2020-12-18 09:00]:
> Dear Richard,
> 
> It is difficult to use a mouse clicking tool to perform the
> keysequence on a virtual keyboard.  When using a mouse clicking tool
> with a virtual keyboard, the number of presses that are saved, stop
> being a tiny fraction.  It is then the keybinding approach that gets
> in the way.

To give you more insights from me as user, I do use toolbar, sometimes
not. In general it does not disturb me neither I see it. It is useful
as one level of accessible user interface. It offers similar to menu
items specific functions by only using the mouse and a click and that
is great.

Emacs with toolbar is on a level more accessible.

Toolbar is occupying only about one third of linear space on my screen
and in my opinion it should be full of functions such as:

- new frame
- bookmarks list
- text properties such as justification full, centering
- Emacs packages
- report emacs bug
- spell checking
- version control check in/out
- calendar
- calculator
- send email
- then help functions like About Emacs or manual

Including a rich toolbar makes options accessible more to users to
discover more useful features of Emacs.

Including more accessibility features would help that Emacs become
useful for more people.

Gestures would be another useful accessibility feature. But I think it
exists already, I just forgot is it a built-in package. Then user
could move mouse in some direction as specified to launch some Emacs
commands. This would help on touch screen as well.

Accessibility on one level more would be speech recognition where user
activates it by saying "M-x" "find file" or "M-x" "mail" to activate
features.