Piet Seiden <seiden@biobase.aau.dk> writes:

I know the treatment of non-U.S. Macintosh users is a recurring issue in TidBITS. But apparently earlier pleas have only had minimum effect as problems continue to appear almost every time I examine some new application's keyboard shortcuts for menu commands. Many developers like to use characters like < or > or [ or ] or ; or : or other non-letter characters. Since many, if not most, of these characters are only accessible on many European keyboards in combination with the Shift and/or the Option key, they cannot be used as keyboard shortcuts. Take for instance the Common Ground MiniViewer that you use to browse Apple's Information Alley newsletters. On a Danish keyboard only the "Previous" command has a working keyboard shortcut. All other shortcuts are ignored. There are two solutions: either developers write their own equivalent of the menukey toolbox routine or they should refrain from using anything but the letters a to z and period and comma as shortcut characters. I believe Apple's Thought Police have guidelines saying much the same. This small issue generates a lot of aggravation over here.

[On a related note, version 1.1 of the Common Ground MiniViewer uses Command-Period as the keyboard equivalent for the Next Page command, in blatant violation of the Apple Human Interface Guidelines. Command-period is supposed to be reserved for interrupting an action. -GD]