New properties for StatusNotifierItem: Accessible Label (1/3)

[Marco Martin]

On Thursday 03 February 2011, Ted Gould wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> For an intro see the mail with the (0/3) in the subject line.
> 
> One of the projects we're doing is to try and make Unity more
> accessible.  To that end we'd like to add properties to add accessible
> labels for the icons that could be given to screen readers.  We're
> planning on issuing warnings if an icon is set without an accessible
> label, it would be great if the KDE object could do the same.  Here are
> the properties that we're thinking about: IconAccessibleLabel and
> AttentionAccessibleLabel.  They should be strings describing the
> icons/movies, localized and change with the icon.  An example would be
> "Battery 45%".
> 
> 		--Ted
> 
> PS - I don't think that OverlayAccessibleLabel makes sense, but I'd love
> to hear people's comments on that.

This is a really good idea, let's analyze it.

Basically, what the normal icon, the attention icon and the overlay indicate 
is a status, someting descriptive about what's going on (let's say battery 
45%)

now, we have a text representation, and that is what's written in the tooltip. 
this may or may not be enough for a screenreader to represent it textually...

so, we could have a staus for "normal" and "active", always exposed to the 
bus, or a status text that is always the current, that is updated from the 
application, (and also when the icon status changes from normal to 
requestingattention for instance)
so a TextualStatus property could be enough...

ideas?

Cheers,
Marco Martin