Push or Click???

[Helen Borrie]

At 01:44 PM 2/06/2009, Garnier Garnier wrote:

>Hi
>
>I have a query:
>
>Which is technically accurate, Push the Browse button to activate the browser on click the Browse button to activate the browser?

IMO, neither is 100% correct.  If you "click" a button (with a pointer device such as a mouse) it sometimes looks as though it has been "pushed".  But some button interfaces don't look like that. 

Also, some people use the keyboard exclusively, using Alt + the "hot" character to trigger the button event. 

I'd recommend reserving the verb "push" (or better, "press") to refer to buttons on a physical device and "click", qualified by "right", "left" or "middle" to refer to an event that cannot be triggered by any other means except physically clicking on a mouse button.  The documentation has to "work" for the intended audience and the physical interface.  

Footnote :: Lately, I've been distance-teaching my 88-year-old, arthritic mother, in another country, to use Skype on a laptop.  It's no use telling her to "click" or "press" anything:  she's physically incapable of gripping a mouse, never mind *clicking* it!  But given a track pad with a right and left button above it, she's born again! 

She scrolls quite comfortably (she says) around the screen with all four fingers of her right hand on the track pad.  In the notes I made up for her, I've instructed her to "move the cursor onto...whatever button or text box...and tap-tap on the track pad".  She does the "tap-tap" with her left hand and, if she misses, her double-tap usually lands as a double-click on the left mouse button above the track pad.  Hooray for redundancy!  Right-click is easy - she just slides her right hand up onto the right mouse button and *presses* it. ;-) 

Helen