Re: Application menu.

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron sun com>]

Matthias:

Matthias Clasen wrote:
> > I've thought of one other concern about this.  The HIG basically forbids
> > using menu items in your menubar that are multiple words, and for good
> > reason.  This could be very difficult for some applications.  Take, for
> > example, gucharmap.  I'm sure we don't want a 'gucharmap' menu.  We'd
> > rather have a more human-friendly name, like the names used in the
> > applications menu (not to be confused with the "Application Menu" we're
> > discussing here).  But "Unicode Character Map" isn't a very good menu
> > title.
>
>
> How about using the application icon instead of a label ? 
> I think this is not uncommon on other platforms. 
> (I'm seeing it at least in ClearQuest, Opera and Excel on this Windows
> machine)

Remember that AT (accessible technology) programs display the menu label
to the user by default, and an icon contains no descriptive information.
Therefore when this menu item has focus, users of AT programs wouldn't
be given any information about the choice.

Of course, the program can explicitely set a label using the appropriate
ATK interface to override the default behavior.  Though displaying a
multi-word description to AT users still violates the fact that the HIG
forbids using menu items with multiple words.

--

Brian