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

Mon Feb 7 15:10:18 CET 2011

On Monday 07 February 2011, Aurélien Gâteau wrote:
> > > 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)

title and icons are already outside the body in the spec and the title *can't* 
have html
th tooltip is a single proprty, that is a struct unfolded as this
icon (name or binary dump as usual)
title (short, plain text, must be meaningful and always present)
subtitle (optional, can have html)

if i read the titles and subtitles of all the icon tooltips i have in my 
systray i have
* "KGpg - encryption tool"
* Kopete: this one is bad since the detailed status info is in the subtitle as 
html, but reading the plain text should convey enough info like "jabber: 
notmart at gmail.com (offline) MSN: notmart at gmail.com (offline)" etc..
* "clipboard contents"   -  first line in the clipboard
* "Volume at 70%"
* "Keyboard layout"  - "Italy"
* "KDE wallet"  -  "a wallet is open"

all of them, seem to convey quite all the informations i need if are read out 
loud.
I would see maybe an optional field to be used instead of the tooltip *if not 
possibleto put enough info in the tooltip* rather the other way around.

Cheers,
Marco Martin