Comment 35 for bug 527458

Just two little notes

1) Extra info for audio volume
In gnome-volume-control-applet the tooltip shows your current output device. If you have, for instance, internal audio and USB speakers, the current indicator-sound icon can't be used to quickly check status, you have to open Sound Preferences capplet and go to Output tab. This is an use case where a little and unobtrusive tooltip could really make the difference for end user.

2) Tooltips are better then grayed menu entries for a11y
The approach used in Rhythmbox (see image by Vish in comment #5) is good only for non-visually impaired people. You can't focus grayed menu items, so screen readers will be unable to expose this extra info to visually impaired people[1]. AT-SPI infrastructure should be able to access to GtkTooltips content with no extra effort. Of course, for the sake of a11y, other solutions could be explored, like add the extra info directly to the icon: for example, giving focus the Rhythmbox indicator icon the screen reader could automatically speak something like "Rhythmbox indicator, playing Share the Software by Jono Bacon", or the message indicator could say "3 new emails, 4 unreaded chat replies" and so on. But I suppose this will need some work in libindicator infrastructure and APIs (currenly libindicator is very poor in a11y support, see poor and misleading keyboard navigation support)

[1] maybe orca could do something using flat review mode, but running flat menu mode while navigating a menu should be a real non-sense