Impressive, isn’t it? But the question that pops in my mind is would I really like that kind of User Interface? I think not. Especially now, after I’ve gotten used to the point-and-click one. It’s like walking and driving a car, it’s natural and intuitively to walk but once I’ve learned to drive and interact with the car via its wheel, pedals and gear stick interface, any attempt to drive a car that was supposed to be handled with a revolutionary interface that would make driving similar to walking would quickly turn me in an even greater menace that I already am.

The interface is funny to use, but after a some time it gets boring. It could be more intuitive and help old people use the computer, but by the time this interface will be widely used, we will be the “old people”. I think it’s a very interesting experiment, just like dontclick.it was 5 years ago, but I doubt that will ever hit the market.

I’m waiting for the vocal computer interface, just like they had in Star Trek.

Proper use of labels

You can assign labels to text inputs or textareas by specifying the “for” attribute. Like so:

<label for="username">Enter your username</label>
<input type="text" name="username" id="username">

This will help screen readers and other software designed to help impaired people surf the web to correctly interpret your code and make the right associations between labels and textfields. For instance, the following piece of code displays a table row with some form tags in it:

<tr>
	<td>
		Enter your username
	</td>
	<td>
		<input type="text" name="username" id="username" />
	</td>
</tr>

For a normal visitor, this is very simple to understand because the “Enter your username” text and the username textfield are on the same line. But for a blind person that uses a screen reader, this will not be displayed at all. And the screen reader must decide witch text goes with what textfield.

On this example, I believe that most screen readers will make the right connection between text and textfield, but if the html code becomes a little more complicated (ie. more text or other tags) I sure that the screen reader will fail to make the right assumptions. But the use of labels can fix that.

Label’s accesskey

If you want to give your forms a cool “web2.0 style” functionality, you can specify the accesskey attribute for your labels. For example you can do something like:

<label for="username" accesskey="u">Enter your <strong>u</strong>sername</label>
<input type="text" name="username" id="username" />

…and when the user presses CTRL/ALT + u (depending on the browser) he’ll be taken directly to that textfield. Pretty neat.