Make disabled buttons focusable & show their tooltips on hover

[avvvvve]

Your idea

There is some consensus among folks working on accessibility that disabled UI elements should still be focusable AND should still show their associated tooltip when users hover on them (or in some cases, a tooltip explaining why the thing is disabled).

If non-sighted users can't focus on an element, they have no way of knowing it's there. Instead of actually disabling elements, elements should look disabled but remain focusable, and screen readers should tell users when (and sometimes why) the element is disabled.

We should investigate whether this would prove a useful feature for non-sighted MSS users. There might be cases where a whole section of elements are be disabled, and then it might be cumbersome to navigate through them all to find the next enabled thing.

Sources:

• https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/103239/should-disabled-elements-be-focusable-for-accessibility-purposes
• https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2021/08/frustrating-design-patterns-disabled-buttons/#making-disabled-buttons-more-inclusive

Related issue reports:

• Tooltips don't show in the empty program (version 4.5) #26206

Example of why this matters

Take the case of a screen-reader user navigating the Instruments panel:

Screen.Recording.2025-01-27.at.1.01.40.PM.mov

If you haven't yet selected an instrument in the list, the up/down/trash buttons in the top row are disabled, and you can't navigate focus to them, so when you're focused on that area all you'll know is that there's an Add button. Pressing the right arrow does nothing.

Then you press tab and select an instrument. The buttons above become active, but you don't know that because you're not focused on them. You'd then have to keep exploring the panel: tab-shift back to the add row, and press the right arrow to find the new buttons. But since the right arrow didn't do anything before, you might not guess to press it.

Checklist

• This request follows the guidelines for reporting issues
• I have verified that this feature request has not been logged before, by searching the issue tracker for similar requests

[cbjeukendrup]

For the record, disabling tooltips for disabled items was done semi-intentionally as part of #25697