Re: PSA: Accessibility in a menubar-less design

[Paolo Borelli <pborelli katamail com>]

Hi Joanie,

    thanks for bringing this up.

On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 1:43 AM, Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs igalia com> wrote:

I just fired up Gedit and noticed the menubar is gone. I'm guessing we
will start to see more and more apps move in this direction, so a couple
things I would ask app developers and designers to consider:

I committed a first patch[1] addressing some of the most obvious problems, but I am sure there are more. Can you remind me if there are some guidelines for these labels? Let's take for instance the "save" button that now just uses an icon: what I did was to set "Save" as the atk name and "Save the current document" as the atk description, is that correct? Or should I just set the name and use a more verbose label?

The description I set is pretty much the same string we put in tooltip, can you remind me if the a11y tools do actually look into the tooltip string automatically and so setting the atk description is redundant?

 

1. There should be an intuitive, consistent, immediate way to jump to
   the widgets that live in the header bar. I think this shortcut should
   move to the first of the widgets. I'd like to toss out F10 for
   consideration since that's what tends to work in menubar-possessing
   apps. But I'm not wedded to that idea, as long as we can agree upon,
   implement, and document that shortcut.

I am fine with F10, though maybe I would have expected it to open the cog menu directly, not focus the header bar. On the other hand actions in the header bar are *not* duplicated in the cog menu, so maybe just focusing the header bar is better

 

2. Focusable widgets should have meaningful accessible names. The cog
   menu in Gedit's name is "Menu." "Menu" is also the name of the
   drop-down-opening "v" widget to the right of the "Open" button.
   It would be great to have a short, but more informative and
   sufficiently unique, name for each.

This is related to https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=724048

The current feedback from the design team is to not set a tooltip for the cog menu button, but it would be great to have general guidelines for this pattern, including what to put in the atk labels.

Ciao

    Paolo

 

1: https://git.gnome.org/browse/gedit/commit/?id=79bfb0437433ab1029f74a04f53afc5fa5c5f0cc