Re: Stock items - toolbar label vs. menu label

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

Havoc Pennington wrote:

> I don't really agree with that - perhaps toolbar key navigation
> shouldn't be via mnemonics, but certainly it should exist. Calum's bug
> report on this in bugzilla suggests that tab-navigation of toolbars be
> allowed. But mnemonics make sense to me too for toolbars with text.

I think I sit somewhere between the two here... as you say, I do think
that toolbars should be focusable/navigable with the keyboard, just
because in this day and age it's downright inconsiderate to have large
parts of a GUI that aren't.  

Since toolbars would normally share the same mnemonic context as the
application's menu bar, though, I'm not so sure they should generally
have mnemonics themselves... unless they only worked (and were shown)
when the toolbar had focus, which would be slightly odd and
inconsistent. Otherwise, people might quite reasonably expect the
toolbar's mnemonic to work whether they had set the toolbar to
icons-only or not, and it would be pretty hard to find enough mnemonics
to go around both the menu bar and the toolbars in some cases.  

One alternative might be to offer an optional second row of text under a
toolbar button that showed its accelerator, if it had one (Ctrl+X for
Cut etc.), but I doubt if that would catch on... GNOME toolbar buttons
are fairly elephantine as it is, so it would probably just take up too
much screen real-estate considering you can get the same information off
the menus.

But I could be way off the mark here... maybe some of the folks on the
accessibility list have a view on this?

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems