I’m surprised by some of the confusion regarding my original question. Modal dialogs? Tool tips? Ummmmm. Haven’t you ever used an application that used the context of what the mouse was hovering over to temporarily “reveal” some additional UI controls that gave you access to functionality without having to go search through a menu? When it works well, it is as if the software is reading your mind, and nicely suggesting some functionality for you to consider. Kind of like: Hey – you’re hovering over a graph, lots of times when people do that, the next thing they do is click to select the graph and then they go in search of the print button (or delete button, or whatever). Therefore, every time the user hovers over a graph, let’s automatically display a print button near the graph so they can easily access that functionality. Maybe that would be nice and efficient for the user. Maybe that would be annoying for the user, because they didn’t want that stuff popping up at them. Anyway, that’s the general idea. I think it works well sometimes, but not always, so I’d like to know when I should hover/reveal and when I shouldn’t.

A good example from Apple (since there seem to be some Microsoft haters in here) is the Mac Mail app. When a mail message is open, hover near the gray separator line at the top of the message and – voila! – four buttons appear that let you delete the message and move quickly among your other messages.

I was just looking for some best practices, some of which are probably common sense, like:
1) Use it judiciously.
2) Use it only for very common, or frequently used functionality.
3) Fade the controls into view (don’t “pop” them up in an annoying fashion)
Etc.

My particular application of this kind of control that I’m considering is to reveal controls over a splitter control that lets users quickly move the split all the way to the top or bottom. Some in my group think this is bad, and that the controls should always be visible, or not visible at all. I like the idea of only revealing the controls when the mouse is over the splitter, under the assumption that the user has shown their intention to move the split. But I’m not sure. (So we’ll test of course.)

Nice tripe Clippy reference. Did you come straight from Slashdot to post that?

Clearly you misunderstand what I mean by not being able to mark up content properly for accessibility. I’m referring to the fact that as an authoring tool Word does not conform with the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative’s Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines in that it does not support the task of creating accessible content.

The minitoolbar, which appears as if from the mists of a primeval swamp whenever I select a bit of text, lets me change the way text looks. It does not let me tell Word why I’m making that change in appearance. To give Word that information, I would have to apply an appropriate style.

The minitoolbar lets me make headings look big and bold or italic and put them in a different font, if I want to. And I can use the idiot’s tool, the Format Paintbrush, to make all headings of the same type look alike. But it doesn’t let me assign a style to the selected text.

When I make headings look like headings but don’t apply styles to them, Word can’t automatically produce a complete and correct outline of my document on demand. (Word calls that feature its Document Map — a tool that can be used not only to confirm the outline but also to rapidly navigate the document.) And Word can’t produce a complete and correct table of contents for me, either.

For Word to help me in either of those ways, I have to create my headings using styles — styles that have the correct outline level as one of their attributes.

And when Word can help me in those ways, people who can’t even see my documents can skim through them as quickly and reliably as I can. We can have real-time discussions of whether the current wording of the second step under “Resetting the Gonculator” in Chapter 17 is correct. That’s part of what the accessibility of electronic information is all about: Making sure that everyone, regardless of the technology they need to gain access to information, can get equivalent access to that information.

The minitoolbar from the mists? To me, it’s an annoyance, not a feature. It undermines my workplace’s efforts to ensure that all of our electronic information resources are accessible to everyone.

Come to think of it, the way that minitoolbar appears is appropriate. Because there’s a good name for an annoyance that is spontaneously generated by Microsoft Word and fades in and out of view like a specter:

Ghost of Clippy

I don’t know exactly what you mean by “mark up content properly for accessibility”, but in the Word 2007 example, it’s a non-issue because the hover controls are duplicated in the Ribbon, which is accessible. It’s only an issue where the hover control is the *only* way to perform the action.

I used a webapp some time back where “delete” was implemented as a hover control over the item you wanted to delete. While using my Windows 7 tablet, the control was entirely inaccessible and I actually send them a support email complaining about the inability to delete an item– it never occurred to me to plug-in a mouse and look for hover controls.

Not only could I not use it with my preferred computing platform, I didn’t even know it *existed!*

As for the specific example of Microsoft’s minitoolbar, I think the technical term for that is “PITA.” At least that’s what it is to me as I try to get thousands of people who to produce accessible content with Microsoft Word.

None of the controls provided in that toolbar mark up content properly for accessibility. It’s the electronic equivalent of kindergarten tools — fat pencil, crayons, construction paper, safety scissors, and paste — when we need people to be using the powerful, accessibility-supporting tools of a third-millennium word processor.

I don’t have a ready understanding of the ways modal dialogs can be coded and which of those ways are less of a barrier to accessibility, but I hope I can inspire others who do to join this discussion.