Its most common use case is interrupting games

The Picard Maneuver@startrek.websitemod to Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world – 524 points –
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It's an accessibility thing. If you can't press two keys at once, then you can turn it on and press the modifier key, then the active key.

It would be nice if the default wasn't being on, or it asked during installation or something.

I bet someone who needs it likes that it's on by default.

This is a rare case of an accessibility feature often being someone's roadblock...

It's a hell of a lot easier to disable than it is to enable, especially if you're not disabled. It's a minor inconvenience once for us, but enabling it could be exceedingly difficult to overcome for someone else.

Yea, a disabled person might have to get help to enable sticky keys if it wasn't on by default. Most non-disabled people should not need help, unless they are so tech illiterate that they don't know how to use Google.

It's a small annoyance that gets less annoying if you look at it from an empathetic viewpoint.

Don't you just press shift 7 times and then click yes? What can you even do on a keyboard if you can't do that? It seems like they intentionally made it easier to enable than completing pretty much any other task on a keyboard.

More one of those long ramps that switches back several times that you can ignore and take the stairs.

It asks when you do it the first time lol, although asking at installation might be a better idea

Eh, many people use computers but are not the ones who installed the operating system (e.g. work, school, library, etc.). I think it's likely more accessible to be able to enable the feature at any time, if needed. In my experience pressing shift five times generally only happens to me when playing games. I don't know how often it pops with normal web browsing, email, etc.

I usually have it turned off. But I found it kinda useful once that I had a cast in one hand.

There’s also no reason for a game to inadvertently trigger it. All games should clear the SKF_HOTKEYACTIVE flag on launch to disable the feature trigger during gameplay. Unreal, Unity, and most other engines do this by default.

And that's all fine and dandy.
If it didn't randomly decide to turn on.

It turns on when you tap shift 5 times in a row. It also has a pop up when it turns on giving you a link to the setting to turn off that behavior. Just turn it off when it happens if you aren't going to use it.

That's what the meme is making fun of.

That is actualla good feature then, if you need it for accessibility... But why on earth does it need to prompt you to enable it with such an annoying way? To my knowledge, it's the only accessibility option that agressively advertises itself specifically when you don't want, or need, it to.

More logical behaviour to prompt the enabling would be if a "modifier" key, and "non-modifier" key is pressed in sequence, but not at the same time. As the assumption of sticky keys is that the user is not able to press two buttons down simultaneously.

That said, it is likely that a person who has need for this feature, but is not aware of it's excistence, would not use other modifiers than shift, as they are needed exclusively for hotkeys, which is on the far end of the learning curve (as mouse, and right klick are more apparent to learn), and if such feature is needed, it's excistence is apparent at the time you start to use the systems via hotkeys. Instead, if you hammer shift repeatedly while typing, it indicates that you light benefit from tjis feature. Thus only requiring detection of the writing cursor being active, which is already possible, because there is an accessibility feature to highlight that. I know this, because a fresh install of windows suggests that you go trough accesdibility on first startup.

Sorry, I know you're not developing Windows UI (but what do I know, if you did), but I kindawanted to rant a bit about such an apparent solution to a problem that has plagued from Win 3.11 at least.