You should see letters and special characters appearing on the top of the screen.
What you mean by no shortcut optimisation I don't know because it's easy enough to open the properties of a shortcut in windows 7 and under the shortcut tab add any switch modifier to the target. Just the same as it's always been.
If he's using the Games Explorer or Games Explorer menu on the start menu, then no. It is not as simple as right-clicking. However, I think you *copy* the shortcut out of the _All Programs_ menu and modify that copy instead.