Ergonomic considerations

Sometimes I have to work with another proprietary software, which the client uses to translate the software strings for mobile phones - i.e. the texts which appear as phone screen messages, dialogs, etc.

This one is particularly annoying - it's done in Access, and the developers, IMHO, should be shot, as a deterrent measure for discouragement of other such "developers" with complete disregard for ergonomics. Perhaps even worse punishment would be to force them to use their own creation for a couple of hours....

The program is an ergonomic nightmare - for each string you translate, you need to click on several dissociated buttons on the screen. Even the most elementary rule of software UI is broken - the tab order is totally haphazard!

Not only that - but those buttons you need to click all the time do not have any keyboard equivalents!

Since I've been using that particular POS for years, I naturally devised some workarounds.

When I started to work with the program, I developed an immense and strong hatred for whoever programmed it... My right wrist started aching in about half an hour... despite the fact that I always use a wrist rest for my "mouse hand". So, something had to be done.

My first solution was to just extract the strings from the underlying Access file, export them to Word, and use Trados to translate.

However, populating the Access file back with the translated strings wasn't always easy, and, besides, I couldn't see if my strings are too long while translating in Word - which meant a lot of rewriting once I loaded the translations back into the original program and discovering that many of them are too long.

Not good.

I realized I'll actually have to use the program itself. So, I thought about it, and decided to add my own keyboard shortcuts.

The program comes in executable form (.EXE file), but thanks to a very good program - Resource Hacker - I was able to modify it and add my own keyboard shortcuts (accelerators).

"Resource Hacker" is free to use, so that's another plus!

BTW, after several years (and several versions) of using this particular localization tool, which is the subject of this post, the latest version (which I got about a month ago), finally has keyboard accelerators! Of course, not ALL of them :(

It now has about 3 out of at least 5-6 necessary accelerators.

Sheesh!