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

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Thursday, February 3, 2011, Ted Gould wrote:
> 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. 

this is true for traditional tooltips, but the ones in a SNI are not like 
those tooltips at all: they have titles, subtext, etc. they are supposed to, 
in an SNI, be fully descriptive. are the a11y folks aware of those differences 
between SNI tooltips and "normal" ones on  e.g. pushbuttons?

what this denotes to me is that maybe we need to revamp the documentation 
around tooltips (and as marco pointed out on irc earlier today, perhaps that 
was an unfortunate name to choose in the spec :/ ) so that this is very clear 
to app devs too.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks
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