Comment 9 for bug 521309

joshedmonds, in 10.04 you can change volume with the scroll wheel without opening the menu first. (Ironically you can't do it if you *do* open the menu first, which is bug 572929.)

Luca, I'm not aware of any longstanding Gnome paradigm that menu titles have tooltips. The overall change we're making is converting notification area items, which have all sorts of inconsistent behaviors, into menus that behave consistently. Part of that consistent behavior is not having tooltips on their titles. That may make individual items slightly less efficient to use, but we are confident that the overall improvement outweighs any local awkwardness.

For usability issues especially, it's important to report problems rather than solutions. "Show tooltip with current sink and audio level" is not a problem, it's an assumed solution. "Can't see exact volume while changing it with scrollwheel" would be an example of a more valid bug report. "Can't access numeric value of sound volume" would also be an example of a more valid bug report.