It's so weird for me to live through software evolution to the point where this no longer goes without saying.
In the Windows 3.1 days, it was nearly impossible to make a program that wasn't fully keyboard-usable. Even if you left out all the hotkeys in the menus and messed up the tab order, it was still possible (even if annoying) to get through it with the keyboard, and adding the hotkeys (as well as actual shortcuts) and setting a sensible tab order was super easy and straightforward.
Nowadays more than half of all software is made using non-native GUI toolkits (or sometimes no toolkits at all) that refuse to implement any of the typical keyboard navigation that would previously have come for free.
The keyboard makes computers a joy to use for me. Seeing it disappear makes me very sad. Seeing how the vast majority of people don't care that it disappeared makes me feel like an alien from another planet.
My favorite example of keyboard power is qutebrowser¹ which turns any website keyboard navigable as well as all browser functionality too. It's a really fast and comfortable work flow.
Same. I think part of the problem is that keyboard shortcuts are often not very discoverable. For example on Macos, pop-up dialogs often have keyboard shortcuts for their non-default buttons, but I'm not sure where you're supposed to learn this. Lack of discoverability leads to many people not using them which leads to devs not implementing them.
I wouldn't care to read manual for my microwave, as long as basic functions work. Similarly, people don't seem to bother to use their software to its full potential.
In the Windows 3.1 days, it was nearly impossible to make a program that wasn't fully keyboard-usable. Even if you left out all the hotkeys in the menus and messed up the tab order, it was still possible (even if annoying) to get through it with the keyboard, and adding the hotkeys (as well as actual shortcuts) and setting a sensible tab order was super easy and straightforward.
Nowadays more than half of all software is made using non-native GUI toolkits (or sometimes no toolkits at all) that refuse to implement any of the typical keyboard navigation that would previously have come for free.
The keyboard makes computers a joy to use for me. Seeing it disappear makes me very sad. Seeing how the vast majority of people don't care that it disappeared makes me feel like an alien from another planet.