[gdm-list] GDM 2.28 a11y issues

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi All:

I've not had much of a chance to experiment with the new GDM 2.28 until 
recently.  Here is a summary my experiments with GDM 2.28 from over the 
weekend on my OpenSolaris b125 box.  It's a semi-exhaustive list, but I 
don't guarantee I didn't miss anything.

The "+" items are good things.  The "-" entries are bad things.  I sent 
this feedback to Brian Cameron just this morning, but it seems as though 
I should also share it with the gdm team and then transform it into bugs 
in bugzilla once we've determined things aren't pilot error on my part.

+ Keyboard navigation works.

+ The high contrast selection works.

+ The larger font selection works.

- A metacity error dialog appears when I log in.  The dialog contains a 
table.  The title of the table is 'These windows do no support "save 
current setup" and will have to be restarted manually next time you log 
in.'   The table consists of two columns. The first column is 'Class' 
and the second column is 'Window'.  The sole entry in the table is 
'Login Window'/'Gdm-simple-greeter'.

- The a11y icon should be in a corner of the screen to allow for more 
easy mouse access.  Right now, it's tucked somewhere in the middle of 
the panel.

- The a11y icon should allow a 'hover' operation similar to the icon 
used to enable MouseTweaks in the MouseTweaks applet.  When the icon is 
activated via a hover operation, MouseTweaks should be enabled in 'hover 
mode' and the a11y dialog should open.

- There are no keyboard shortcuts or mouse gestures to launch the a11y 
dialog.  Instead, need to Ctrl+Alt+Tab to panel and navigate to the icon 
and activate it.

- There are no shortcuts to launch any assistive technology.  We 
probably need a community discussion about these if the same gestures 
are to be available at the login screen and the user session.

- The magnifier launches the 'magnifier' application instead of Orca 
(Orca's magnification is preferred because it follows keyboard focus). 
The magnifier also comes up in split screen mode instead of full screen 
mode.

- The gdm screen is launched without accessibility enabled.  As a 
result, GTK+ does not appear to load the a11y modules and the 
at-spi-registryd is not launched.  This yields the login screen 
inaccessible.  a11y probably should be enabled by default for the gdm 
screen, and this would hopefully fix the issues.

- SlowKeys and BounceKeys features don't seem to work, but StickyKeys does.

- When any of the AccessX keys are enabled, the "Keyboard Accessibility 
Status" applet should appear in the panel (it currently does not).  This 
applet provides the user with AccessX feedback, such as which modifiers 
are latched/locked.

- Ctrl+Alt+Backspace doesn't seem to work any more (maybe an X Server 
configuration issue?).

- Entering Ctrl, Alt, Tab in sequence when StickyKeys is enabled doesn't 
seem to permit the selection of the bottom panel.  It should.

- The GOK keyboard does not reflect the physical keyboard layout (it 
probably should -- if not possible, it probably should reflect a 
PC-101/PC-102/etc. layout).  Instead, it's a minimal A-Z keyboard.  This 
simplified keyboard does not include an "Alt" key.

- No audio cues seem to be given.  We should have a login screen sound 
enabled by default.  This might be an audio permissions or configuration 
problem on my machine.

- Speech doesn't work.  It seems to launch, but no output is sent to the 
speakers.  Running 'test-speech' as the gdm user from a shell logged in 
via a different machine also seems to result in no speech.  Note that 
the speech synthesis process runs, so this might be an audio permissions 
or configuration issue.

- It would be nice if we could agree on a single a11y icon.  I prefer 
some form of the vitruvian man - 
http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=logo.png

Thanks!

Will