Re: help needed: window focus bugs

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Thanks for the reply Elijah.  I know you and Rob do try and give some
thought to the accessibility issues, and it's much appreciated.

I have two main thoughts about the proposed change to focus behavior. 
One, since it's new and complex, we don't really have enough experience
to say what will break.  Secondly, though the DEMANDS_ATTENTION hint
will probably be very useful to accessibility, doing anything useful
with it at this time would require new API in at-spi and new code.  So
I'd really prefer not to see this in 2.8.0 unless there's an on/off
switch available in the DesktopPreferences->Window capplet or at least a
gconf-only setting.

I do know that sometimes the current "new-window-gets-focus" behavior
can be annoying, and in other scenarios the alternative
"new-window-doesn't-get-focus" could be a serious accessibility
blocker.  It might be that we don't need to turn this feature off, it
might be that DEMANDS_ATTENTION is better than always focussing, we just
don't know enough to say, right now.  And I don't know anyone with
enough time on their hands (and a11y expertise) to thoroughly check
before 2.8.0 is released.

best regards,

Bill

On Thu, 2004-08-12 at 13:56, Elijah Newren wrote:
> On Thu, 12 Aug 2004, Bill Haneman wrote:
> 
> > This thing (focus stealing prevention) scares the bejeesus out of me,
> > accessibility-wise.  Is there some way to just turn it off at the
> > WM-config level, instead of rebuilding metacity, if it turns out to
> > break some of the accessibility stuff?
> 
> Rob thought about accessibility and suggested we might need to do just
> that in comment 86 of bug 118372.  (although I admit to forgetting about
> that until you sent this email)
> 
> However, note that there is another hint that might provide a solution
> instead of special casing accessibility.  Whenever Metacity denies a
> new window focus, it sets the _NET_WM_STATE_DEMANDS_ATTENTION hint for
> that window.  Libwnck catches this hint and sets the name of the app in
> bold for the tasklist on the panel.  Perhaps accessibility apps could
> catch this hint and play a sound or something similar.
> 
> You'll have to let us know what you think will work best.  If you'd like
> it special-cased and disabled for accessibility, file a bug, mark it
> urgent, and have it block bug 149028.
> 
> 
> Elijah