[g-a-devel] Question about menus, icons, and labels.

[Luke Yelavich <themuso ubuntu com>]

Hi all,
For those of you who use, or have used recent releases of Ubuntu, you may remember having used indicators to perform some functions on your desktop. Indicators are the icons that are found on the top right corner of the panel in the last few ubuntu releases. Not all the icons are indicators, but the vast majority are. An indicator is an icon that represents a common set of tasks/functions that a user may wish to perform, i.e there is an indicator for session management to log out/restart etc. Indicators are also used to convey info to the user, such as new email, new chat messages waiting, etc.

At the code level, these indicators are menus in a menu bar. The vast majority of indicators are icons only, with only one indicator, the icon with your username to the right of it, being a menu with an icon and label. I am currently working on improving the accessibility of these indicators, i.e labelling these icons in atk so that when a user navigates over them with orca for example, they are given meaningful information about what the indicator is used for. For example with the sound indicator, I want to let the user know what their volume setting is, wether they have a track playing, and what the currently playing track is. A lot of info, but at the moment this is just an example. I also want to change what the user is given when navigating over the "Me" indicator, as its officially called. At the moment, orca will label the menu with your username, as is shown visually, since the username is a menu label. 

All is fine with labeling the indicators that are only icons, i.e I am able to call gtk_widget_get_accessible to get the atk object associated with that menu, and set a name for it. However, this doesn't appear to work for the me indicator. Even when the atk object for that menu has a different name set, Orca seems to read the label.

One way to reproduce this is to open accerciser, navigate to the applications menu on the panel, and using the console, set a different name for the menu, like so:

acc._set_name("Menu")

You will notice that whilst the name on the left changes, the information about the object's name on the right does not change.

So my question. is it possible to adjust the atk object to convey different textual information to the user via orca compared to what is shown visually in a menu label?

Thanks

Luke