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

[Ted Gould]

On Thu, 2011-02-03 at 14:37 +0100, Marco Martin wrote:
> On Thursday 03 February 2011, Ted Gould wrote:
> > 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...

Yeah, in talking to the a11y folks they like tooltips, but they really
wanted another label as sometimes the tooltips don't describe the icon
enough for a blind user to know what it means.  Apparently screen
readers can distinguish and make tooltips additional information as
well.  Also, sometimes tooltips can be too complex for screen readers to
do a good job with them.

> 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?

I thought about this, and I think that in general, this works as well.
But it seemed to me that it didn't align with the "spirit" of the spec
in that if we're describing icons, we should describe the icons in the
way that they're represented on DBus.

		--Ted

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