Use of accelerators (mnemonics) in app menus

[Alexandre Franke <alexandre franke gmail com>]

Hi,

With the GMenu transition happening during the 3.5 cycle, we have seen
many applications remove their accelerators (that _ characters that
allows you to select a menu item using the alt key) from the menu
items that were moved to the app menu (the menu you get when clicking
the application name in the top bar in GNOME Shell). The reason behind
such removals seems to be that GNOME Shell doesn't display nor enable
accelerators in the app menu.

However, in other environments, the app menu is consolidated and
displayed in the menu bar of the window as the first item. In this
context, the accelerators could be very useful and losing them should
be considered a regression.

Is there a technical reason that pushes removal of the accelerators,
such as a bad GNOME Shell behaviour when they are present? Will GNOME
Shell use accelerators in app menus someday? That may be seen as an
accessibility feature. Is there by the way a keyboard shortcut to open
the app menu?

What's even more confusing to us is that while some modules got rid of
these accelerators, some others did not. We thus think that there's no
technical barrier to have them and we'd like to have some consistency.
Can we push module maintainers to have accelerators in their app menu?

Regards.

-- 
Alexandre Franke
On behalf of the i18n team