Re: How to popdown a tooltip

["Padraig O'Briain" <Padraig Obriain sun com>]

I am spent some time attempting another implementation of the Escape key to 
popdown a tooltip; details in a mail to gtk-devel-list in a short while.

The Escape key will popdown a tooltip only it was shown using Ctrl+F1.

Padraig

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> To: "Padraig O'Briain" <Padraig Obriain sun com>
> CC: hp redhat com, gtk-devel-list gnome org, 
gnome-accessibility-list gnome org
> Subject: Re: How to popdown a tooltip
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> Padraig O'Briain wrote:
> 
> > Should the Escape key cause a tooltip to be popped down, only if the tooltip
> > is for the focus widget?
> >
> > Do we expect different behavior if the tooltip was displayed because of 
mouse
> > movement or because Ctrl+F1 key was pressed?
> > 
> > What effect should other keys have while the tooltip is showing?
> 
> All very good questions... I'm not sure I can give you any very good
> answers, at least not that I can back up with any good accessibility or
> usability reasons  :)
> 
> My first thought was that if there's a tooltip visible, I'd expect to be
> able to pop it down with Esc regardless of how it had been posted
> (mouseover or Ctrl+F1), or whether or not it referred to the
> currently-focused control.
> 
> However, I can envisage situations where this might cause usability
> problems-- in dialogs that have both a Cancel button and controls with
> tooltips, mostly.  If you're a keyboard user but your mouse happens to
> stray over one of those controls with a tooltip, you then have to press
> Esc twice to cancel the dialog, which may not be obvious (especially if
> you're blind, say), and could be critical in some cases, e.g. if it's a
> progress indicator type dialog and you need to cancel the in-progress
> operation fast.
> 
> So, actually I'm beginning to wonder if any keypress should pop down a
> tooltip, regardless of how it was posted and which control now has
> focus-- but only if that keypress could also still be passed through to
> do its "normal" job.  Which is a big "if", I guess.
> 
> Either way, there's at least one special case, unfortunately-- the
> panel, the objects on which show tooltips when you mouse over them, even
> though the panel itself never really gains focus.  Therefore there's no
> obvious way to pop down those tooltips from the keyboard, because your
> keypresses will go to whatever window on your desktop really does have
> focus at that time.  Maybe that's not such a big deal, though.
> 
> Cheeri,
> Calum.
> 
> -- 
> CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
> mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
> http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771
> 
> Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems