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

Mon Feb 7 11:51:36 CET 2011

> > 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.

What would help is if the tooltip was using semantic markup, instead of a 
subset of html. Think about something like this:

<tooltip>
  <title>Amarok</title>
  <icon src="amarok.png" alt="Amarok"/>
  <body>Currently playing: Qt 4 dance by Trolltech</body>
</tooltip>

With such a format, it would be possible to extract meaningful information for 
a11y purpose.

Heck, this could even be somehow standardized to also work for notifications 
(/me looks at this thread slowly drowning into markup bikeshed)

Aurélien