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Bug 423455

Summary: [Accessibility] Do not use readable characters for icon font symbols
Product: [ECD] Orion Reporter: Mark Macdonald <mamacdon>
Component: ClientAssignee: Anton McConville <antonm>
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX QA Contact:
Severity: normal    
Priority: P3 CC: antonm
Version: 3.0   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: PC   
OS: Windows 7   
Whiteboard:

Description Mark Macdonald CLA 2013-12-06 12:03:27 EST 
The first pass of the Orion icon font has assigned the icons to latin characters. For example the plus icon (add content) is mapped to U+0045 "Latin Capital Letter E".

This may be problematic for screen readers. The icons should instead be assigned to the "Private Use Area" [1], which is reserved for this purpose.

Some of Orion's arrow and triangle icons probably have existing Unicode equivalents, whose code points we can reuse. For example:
 ▾  U+25BE Black down-pointing small triangle
 ▸  U+25B8 Black right-pointing small triangle
 ⬌  U+2B0C Left right black arrow

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas
Comment 1 Mark Macdonald CLA 2014-01-07 14:51:11 EST 
Not sure if this is related, but -- in Chrome, when switching to tabs that I haven't used in a while, I often see Orion's icon fonts replaced with the wrong font, which produces a floating latin letter where the icon should be.

For example, sometimes the twisties in the file list appear as the actual letters 'm' and 'j' in some sans-serif font (looks like Arial or something). When I mouse over these, they revert to the Orion icon. Has anyone else seen this?
Comment 2 Anton McConville CLA 2014-01-08 10:23:02 EST 
I think this is the bug we see in Chrome sometimes:

http://goo.gl/d5UrPq
Comment 3 John Arthorne CLA 2015-05-05 16:21:38 EDT 
Closing as part of a mass clean up of inactive bugs. Please reopen if this problem still occurs or is relevant to you. For more details see:


https://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/orion-dev/msg03444.html