I develop cross-platform desktop apps, and I recently discovered the joy of using help text on widgets. Then the user has a question mark button on the title bar and after he clicks that, he can click any widget in the window and see help text about it. Very nice.
Since I believe that all programs should be fully usable with the keyboard without touching the mouse, I found that on Windows, F1 opens the help text for the widget that has the current focus. Pretty nice so far.
But… F1 is almost always used for the application’s help screen. So we have a clash. What should I do? Is there perhaps a different shortcut key for opening the help text balloons?
According to page 233 of the Microsoft User Experience Guide, F1 displays help, and Shift F1 displays context-sensitive help.