Some Eclipse Foundation services are deprecated, or will be soon. Please ensure you've read this important communication.

Bug 190605

Summary: [Keybindings]Hotkeys (mnemonics) don't work/conflicts
Product: [Eclipse Project] Platform Reporter: Alex Bernstein <alexberns>
Component: UIAssignee: Paul Webster <pwebster>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact:
Severity: normal    
Priority: P3 CC: kurtism, nevicosi, Tod_Creasey
Version: 3.2.1Keywords: helpwanted
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: PC   
OS: Windows XP   
Whiteboard:

Description Alex Bernstein CLA 2007-06-01 18:37:51 EDT 
Build ID: 3.2

Steps To Reproduce:
1.Create an editor part with label and text widgets
2.Assign &E as a mnemonic to the label
3.Press Alt-E, the main menu Edit is activate, instead of focus going to the text widget
4. It used to be that pressing Alt and E sequentially would active main menu, while Alt+E would activate local widgets.

This is a violation of accessibility guidelines.

More information:
Comment 1 Tod Creasey CLA 2007-06-04 08:32:31 EDT 
The issue here is that there is a conflict. When there is a conflict we do our best to allow the OS to resolve it (as the accessibility guidelines require). You should not design your editors or views with mnemonics that conflict with the main menu. Most of our customers who need this use 3rd party tools such as Window Eyes so we don't to get in the way.

Is the guideline you are concerned about entry 1.2 of http://www-03.ibm.com/able/guidelines/software/accesssoftware.html (conflicting with keyboard accessibility features)? If so are we breaking features such as Sticky Keys?

Is this conflict resolved differently in 3.1.2?
Comment 2 Alex Bernstein CLA 2007-06-04 09:21:23 EDT 
As far as I can remember, in prior Eclipse versions, if you hit Alt alone it would take you to the main menu. Then you'd release the Alt key and simple hit E (for edit), or F (for file) and so on. But if you pressed Alt+E together, that would navigate to one of your own controls on editor controls. I believe this is the default behavior on Windows.

As for the design of mnemonics, there is not enough letters to have all labels to have unique assignments. Which leaves me with labels with no mnemonics which is another violation.

I will let Jeff Nevicosi comment on accessibility guidelines adherence, since he is our accessibility tester and has the best knowledge about it.
Comment 3 Kurtis Martin CLA 2009-12-28 15:20:21 EST 
Seems as though this issue isn't present in Eclipse 3.4 and later.  I just tried it and pressing Alt-(mnemonic key) together would correctly give the label/field focus as expected, instead of pulling up the corresponding main menu item.  Pressing Alt, releasing Alt, then pressing another key would correctly bring up the main menu action.
Comment 4 Paul Webster CLA 2010-01-04 11:10:48 EST 
There have been a number of changes in this area in SWT.

If this re-occurs please re-open this bug.

PW