Re: [g-a-devel] idea about a11y for the new GDM (was onboard and mousetweaks...)



Francesco:

At 8:42 AM -0500 9/21/07, Brian Cameron wrote:
Right.  It might make sense to provide configure options so users can
configure whether they want GOK on onscreen to be the
on-screen-keyboard.  This way distros could easily pick between them
at configure time.  This would basically cause the gestures in the
keymouse and dwellmouse gesture listeners to get set to the right
command to launch each program.

<snip>

Again, the new D-Bus interfaces may make it easier to manage
communication between GDM and the session to inform the session
what AT programs to launch when the user logs in.
What about the following approach:

Instead of making GDM launch a specific program, it could indicate what Assistive Technology to launch. A partial list of Assistive Technologies could be: (I tried to find one on the Internet, but did not have much success; so here is what currently comes to my mind)

slow keys
sticky keys
mouse keys
onscreen keyboard
dwelling
voice recognition
magnifier
screenreader
braille output
...
>
GDM would for example only tell to start the onscreen keyboard, leaving it to a sort of "Preferred Application"-Setting to decide whether to start gok, onboard, xvkb,...

There already is a "Preferred Application"-Settings Panel for the GNOME-session that allows the user to choose what application to launch for visual impairement and what application to launch for mobility impairement. But it would have to be adapted in that case.

One complication about this approach is that the GDM user does not have
currently use GConf where I think these settings are currently set.  I
suppose we could make GDM depend on GConf to get these settings, but
is it worth adding a new dependency for this?  The new D-Bus version
of GDM does use GConf, so perhaps this is a moot question.  :)  But
it probably makes sense to do this work in the D-Bus branch rather
than bothering to add GConf as a dependency in the current stable
version.

Ubuntu being the only distribution that I have used, I don't know whether such an approach would make sense. It would render GDM independent of specific applications, but it would require a compatible Preferred Application Setting for the GDM Session; and also for the GNOME session, if we want the GNOME session to automatically enable the same Assistive Technologies (screen reader, or onscreen keyboard, or...) as those that wer enabled in the GDM session. (not necessarily the same application, for example the system administrator could set gok as onscreen keyboard during GDM, but a particular user could set the onscreen keyboard preference to use Dasher in his GNOME session)

Right, since GDM GUI's run as the GDM user, the GDM could have different
GConf settings.  Or we could use a different backend aside from GConf if
we didn't want to use that.

At the moement, I think it makes the most sense to try to get a11y
plugged back into the D-Bus GDM branch and get it working.  Once that
is done, it should be easier to talk about how we want to add new a11y
features to GDM.

Though D-BUS has a mechanism to start applications, I don't know whether it could also be used in the scenario above; in other words, start a specific Assistive Technology without indicating what application to start. I only wanted to present the idea here. Anyway, the approach indicated in the above quotation will probably be the most practical.

Well, GDM would need to have a program that talks to GConf to figure
out what the preferred applications are.  The GDM GUI programs could
either do this directly, or there could be a helper program that the
GUI programs talk to in order to launch such programs.

If you also are interested in enhancing GDM to launch AT programs
in more novel ways (e.g. by directly integrating them into GDM), then
we should discuss.

I looked for any standards on the Internet about how the different Assistive Technologies should be started, but I was not able to find something really useful yet. Now I wonder if any standards exists, and if they do exist, whether they are Desktop or even OS independent.

I think historically, only gnopernicus, dasher, orca and GOK have
existed.  I believe orca has pretty much replaced gnopernicus.  So
there hasn't been much overlap until now that we have onscreen.

Brian





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