Re: Can the community work with Gnome to improve GTK+ a11y?

[Peter Korn <peter korn oracle com>]

Hi Joseph,

You raise a very good point, but I think we need to be careful about when we conflate sighted keyboard-only users with screen reading/magnifying keyboard users.  In some cases their needs are the same (e.g. how does a sighted keyboard user select text from a web page to copy it to the clipboard? same way as a blind keyboard users moves the caret & selects text), in some cases not (e.g. how does a sighted keyboard user discover what the menu's contents are, including which menu items are not available).

Since we don't expect sighted keyboard-only users to use an external assistive technology, everything *must* be built-in.  However, we do expect blind users to use an external assistive technology - in this case a screen reader (which of course should be Orca).  When external AT is involved, it *may* be appropriate to have any given piece of functionality in the AT rather than built into the widgets/toolkit/desktop/environment itself.


I not certain what the right answer is here for unavailable menu items - whether they should be keyboard navigable or not.  In some toolkits they are keyboard navigable (e.g. Swing).  But - other than display of any tooltip associated with an unavailable menu item - there isn't much overlap between sighted keyboard-only users and screen reader users.  Therefore it isn't so clear that the access solutions for those two use cases should be the same.


Regards,

Peter


On 1/5/2012 6:25 AM, Joseph Scheuhammer wrote:

All,

Here are a couple of issues related to the accessibility of disabled menu items.

A similar problem occurs in tool bars with disabled tool bar buttons.  In some toolkits, keyboard-only users cannot navigate (put focus) on disabled buttons.  The rationale for that behaviour is that sighted keyboard-only users *can* see the button, its icon, its label, and so on.  Users can also see that it is disabled (it's greyed out).  For efficiency sake, this rationale goes, there is no need to navigate to it.

However ...

When users hover over a toolbar button with the mouse, a tooltip pops up.  This occurs even when the button is disabled.  BTW, tool bar buttons are not the only UI elements that have tooltips or descriptions.  Other widgets, including menu items (sometimes) have tooltips.

There's an a11y heuristic:  whatever users can do with the mouse, they should be able to do with the keyboard.

There needs to be a way that keyboard only users can navigate to disabled widgets to acquire information about them, such as their role, their label, a tooltip/description, the fact that they are disabled, and other information.

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