Icon buttons have concealed accessibility keys invalidating openly visible mnemonics

  • Create a toolbar button with a label that includes &G/&g.
  • Activate the Windows setting "Underline access keys when available", so the mnemonics of your toolbar buttons are always underlined. (Or, for the sake of simple reproduction, just press Alt to see the mnemonics.)
  • When pressing Alt+G, the up-arrow icon button to the left of the location bar behaves as if it was clicked with the secondary mouse button, invalidating you own toolbar button with the g mnemonic.
  • When pressing Alt+A (the default "Admin" toolbar button has an "A" mnemonic), the favorites icon button to the left of the location bar behaves as if it was clicked, invalidating the default visible a-mnemonic.
  • You can only see the icon buttons' mnemonics when going into customization mode, editing the button and looking for & in the label. This can be irritating and one may think of it as an unchangeable built-in hotkey.
    • The icon buttons' tooltips won't tell you.
    • The key search in the customization dialog doesn't yield any results.

I think a mnemonic shouldn't be able to invalidate another mnemonic. In Windows shell context menus, e.g., pressing a mnemonic that was assigned more than once doesn't exucute one entry right away, but let's you traverse through them. You have to press Enter to activate the respective entry.

Also, the tooltips of the icon buttons should underline the respective characters, at least when said Windows accessibility setting is active. But since, without it, just pressing Alt also doesn't provide any means to see the mnemonic, the underlining should probably be there for all, regardless of accessibility settings.

That isn't the case here or in the current default toolbars, at least. The default Admin button has a hotkey (Ctrl+Shift+A) but doesn't have an accelerator.

I think you shouldn't assign conflicting accelerators when editing your toolbars. :slight_smile:

+1 on mnemonic clashes please.

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Where are the clashes coming from? Presumably from your own toolbar edits? If so, you can fix those yourself. Avoiding clashes entirely is best.

key bindings have nice clash indicators in - customize/keys, something similar for mnemonics would be nice, obviously non-trivial to implement.

On the subject why is the mnemonic key not underlined ?
image
image

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Windows hides mnemonics by default, unless the menu is accessed via the keyboard, because mnemonics are deemed to complicated for ordinary users to comprehend.

hmmm.
image
image

automate it please

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It's a Windows setting, just turn it on if you don't like the default behaviour.

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That doesn't underline the access keys in icon-only button tooltips, only in labels that are permanently visible (or in drop-down lists). I talked about that in my initial comment.

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Latest beta adds those to tooltips:

13.14.7:

  • For buttons that are image only, the tooltip now displays the accelerator key (if any).
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Even if you don't want to allow the user to traverse through elements with the same access key, it still should be more desirable to activate the first element in reading direction with the access key. Reading direction means:

1234
5678

Currently, the location bar always wins.

Simply fix your key clashes and the problem goes away entirely.