Re: Enable accessibility by default in development releases?

[Elijah Newren <newren gmail com>]

On 11/11/05, Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-11-11 at 12:20 -0500, David Malcolm wrote:
>
> > So here's a (possibly crazy) suggestion: during development releases,
> > enable a11y by default, and during stable releases, disable it by
> > default.  That way people running jhbuild, GARNOME etc would be running
> > all of the a11y code, and any bugs in that layer would be discovered
> > more quickly.
>
> Let's do it.
>
> On a few conditions:
>
> - You will write a short tutorial of how to write profiling scripts with
> Dogtail.
>
> - You will write a little bunch of Dogtail scripts that will help us
> profile particularly slow operations (opening the panel menu, doing
> stuff in Evolution)
>
> - Sun will write the dtrace scripts to figure out why/how enabling a11y
> is a performance problem for the desktop:  a11y does a lot of IPC, and
> profiling that is hard unless you have something like dtrace.
>
> All agreed? :)

FWIW, it effectively disables the reduced resources mode in metacity
(except that the minimization animation remains off) which would
result in part of Metacity being untested.  It may also drive users
mad from the constant slow keys and sticky keys dialogs that appear. 
(I know it shouldn't seem like common operations to press shift 5
times in a row or hold it down for over 8 seconds but I seem to
periodically do one or the other without thinking about it,
particularly the latter fairly often)

Those may not be big enough reason to avoid doing it, I'm just
pointing out things to consider.

Cheers,
Elijah