Re: PSA: Accessibility in a menubar-less design

[Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs igalia com>]

Hey Paolo.

On 02/25/2014 03:52 AM, Paolo Borelli wrote:
> Hi Joanie,
>
>     thanks for bringing this up.

Thank you for addressing it so quickly. :)

> 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?

What you did is correct. The more verbose stuff, if deemed of value to
the end user, belongs in the description.

> 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?

Looks like it is redundant as Gtk+ falls back on the tooltip text [2].
And I verified this was working with a quick "hello world" Gtk+ app.

On a related note, looking at your change [1], given that you are using
symbolic icons, I wonder if those could have default names set by Gtk+
so that you and other app devs don't have to provide names unless the
default provided by Gtk+ is not quite right. Matthias and/or Benjamin?

> 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

Aside from the lack of duplication, if you land in the cog menu, how
many widgets are on either side of you? (e.g. if you are a user who is
blind) And if there is not a design rule which specifies that sort of
thing, it will vary from app to app. Moving to the first widget in the
header bar has the benefit of providing a certain amount of orientation
as to where the rest of the stuff is.

> 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.

I'm okay with there being no tooltip. As for the accessible name, I
personally think it should match whatever word(s) we use to describe it
when talking about it (to end users) and in documentation. In other
words, if you wanted me to click on that thing, you'd probably tell me
something like, "Click on the foo button." In which case the accessible
name should be "foo."

Thanks again!
--joanie

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

[2]
https://git.gnome.org/browse/gtk+/tree/gtk/a11y/gtkwidgetaccessible.c#n149