GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 165132
Should alerts have titles or not ?
Last modified: 2020-12-04 18:18:53 UTC
There seems to be a lot of confusion as to whether alerts should have title text or not: http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/windows-alert.html says "Alert windows have no titles, as the title would usually unnecessarily duplicate the alert's primary text" however the draft has some comments saying that possibly they should have, and there seems to be general confusion amongst developers as to whether they should or shouldn't have titles.
The only reason for (possibly) giving them titles was so that screenreaders would be able to identify them. IIRC gnopernicus reads out the text of an alert whenever the alert is focused, though, so this shouldn't be a problem. Cc'ing Bill for clarification. There is at leat one exception that the HIG ought to mention, though-- the few alerts that need to appear in the window list (e.g. an evolution alarm) really should have a title.
Any decisions on this?
There seems to be a lot of uncertainty around this, and I know I've seen this argued both ways in bugs. I'd really love it if the usability and a11y people could lock themselves in a room and reach a consensus- it'll be very useful to a lot of people to have it clarified.
FWIW I've just had a chat with Bill about this, and we're satisfied that there are no significant accessibility issues provided alerts have the accessible role ROLE_ALERT (GtkMessageDialogs have this by default), and they don't appear in the window/alt-tab list (which should be true of the vast majority). But he does think we probably shouldn't explicitly forbid the use of titles in alerts, primarily for cases where either of the above may not be true. I'll try and draft up a revision to the guideline that encompasses this and we can decide whether it's acceptable-- in particular, mentioning the accessible role thing is probably important, since a lot of alert dialogs are hand crafted and won't have this set automatically.
Apologies for spam... ensuring Sun a11y folks are cc'ed on all current accessibility bugs.
Would be also useful to know what the title should look like if the alert appears in the window list (some of the panel error dialogs, eg ;-)).
Let's make sure all relevant text is included in this report. That text seems to be identical in the HIG 2.0 (http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/windows.html), the stable HIG 2.2 (http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/windows.html.en) and the unstable HIG (http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/unstable/windows.html.en) and reads: Windows Parts of Windows and System Interaction Titles Give every window a title (with the exception of alerts and toolboxes). [...] Alerts [...] An alert should not appear in the panel window list unless it is, or may be, the only window shown by an application. [...] Title Format. Alert windows have no titles, as the title would usually unnecessarily duplicate the alert's primary text. [...]
To see whether I understand this discussion (and to get things moving) I'll try to summarize comment #1 and comment #4: Alerts: 0) should have the accessibility role ATK_ROLE_ALERT; and 1) a) have no title; unless b) they need a title because they need to appear in the window list. Correct?
(In reply to comment #6) > Would be also useful to know what the title should look like if the alert > appears in the window list Given this text: Alert windows have no titles, as the title would usually unnecessarily duplicate the alert's primary text. I'd say that could (usually) just be the alert's primary text.
We don't recommend that message dialogs have a visible window title any more. If there's an accessibility issue with this, please file a separate bug.