Re: Can the community work with Gnome to improve GTK+ a11y?

[Joseph Scheuhammer <clown alum mit edu>]

All,

Here are a couple of issues related to the accessibility of disabled 
menu items.

A similar problem occurs in tool bars with disabled tool bar buttons.  
In some toolkits, keyboard-only users cannot navigate (put focus) on 
disabled buttons.  The rationale for that behaviour is that sighted 
keyboard-only users *can* see the button, its icon, its label, and so 
on.  Users can also see that it is disabled (it's greyed out).  For 
efficiency sake, this rationale goes, there is no need to navigate to it.

However ...

When users hover over a toolbar button with the mouse, a tooltip pops 
up.  This occurs even when the button is disabled.  BTW, tool bar 
buttons are not the only UI elements that have tooltips or 
descriptions.  Other widgets, including menu items (sometimes) have 
tooltips.

There's an a11y heuristic:  whatever users can do with the mouse, they 
should be able to do with the keyboard.

There needs to be a way that keyboard only users can navigate to 
disabled widgets to acquire information about them, such as their role, 
their label, a tooltip/description, the fact that they are disabled, and 
other information.

--
;;;;joseph.


'A: After all, it isn't rocket science.'
'K: Right. It's merely computer science.'
             - J. D. Klaun -