Comment 2 for bug 199866

I'm surprised any access keys works. Since there is not an underscore indicating that the menu item has an access key, I've never tried it. I use <ALT>F1, then arrow keys to select items. In general the menu is behaving like a list where the key press will select the first item that starts with that key.

I do not experience the described behaviour by the way in Ubuntu Gutsy. <Alt>F1 activates the Menu Bar. The keys 'p' and 's' do activates the Places and System menu respectively, and pressing a key will select any submenu that starts with that key. The Application menu is a problem. It is not activated by <Alt>F1, I cannot activate it with the 'a' key, even though I can see the menu items.

The GNOME Main Menu also has problems. I can activate it and access the menu items, but it does not behave like application menus. Selecting an item that has a submenu should make the submenu active so that I can use keys to select an item.

I think the GNOME Main Menu (and the Menu Bar used by Ubuntu) violate the HIG. Reading the guidelines at

    http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/menus.html.en

I think the general problem is that both menus do not provide access keys. The Menus are special though, They are not verb/adjective based since they focus on things.

I filed this as GNOME bug #521227 and linked