"If I try to present them with a button that has some text on it, that won't fly." A recommendation: for any item where there is no picture found that clearly and instantly conveys what the button does, even to someone who has never seen it before, use text instead or in addition, and push back against anyone who says otherwise. The inexplicable movement to replace all text (instantly comprehensible by any literate person) with goofy little pictures (often comprehensible only with a great deal of thought, and sometimes only by arbitrary convention that one just has to know) has gotten way too far in the world. When it is one of those "arbitrary convention" items and the so-called "convention" extends no further than this one application, it is even worse and counter-productive. How many toolbars in applications you use every day are full of dozens of tiny pictures that nobody ever clicks on, because doing so requires memorizing huge numbers of non-self-evident picture:action relationships? Any button should either have immediately obvious meaning or text (though I don't necessarily object to a picture going along with the text). Otherwise the user doesn't know about half of the functionality, or has to go mouse-over (if lucky enough to have tooltip text) or experimentally click every single button to see what it does. Users expect that they may need specialized domain knowledge to use an application, but they shouldn't also need specialized UI knowledge. Applications that require you to memorize a whole set of non-standard visual lingo just to use them are highly annoying.
