I'm trying to understand why the notes for alarms are not allowing the operator to type anything into the notes box. Am I missing something obvious?
Those notes are not the same as acknowledgment notes which are entered by the user at run time.
The notes in that tab are entered by the alarm creator to provide the user with general information about the alarm. They can be entered in the designer's tag editor under alarm properties:
The acknowledgment notes are the ones that are not working - the user is unable to enter ack notes.
In the tag editor, there is an option to require acknowledgement notes. That has to be set to true for the acknowledgement notes tab to appear. It will only appear when the acknowledge alarm button is pressed.