Re: Migration Paths for New Modules

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Wed, 2006-07-19 at 14:03 -0400, Willie Walker wrote:
> A big question for me is what does it mean to be 'the screen reader' and
> how does it get launched (much like what it means to be 'the web
> browser' or 'the e-mail reader')?  This is something outside of the
> control of Gnopernicus and Orca, and I'm not sure how this works.
> Guidance here would be greatly appreciated.

I'm not entirely sure about this either, and I'm not sure who's
responsible for this.  Looking at the accessibility preferences,
I see the following label on this machine:

  No Assistive Technology is available on your system.  The
  'gok' package must be installed in order to get on-screen
  keyboard support, and the 'gnopernicus' package must be
  installed for screenreading and magnifying capabilities.

(Why isn't that label selectable?  And who thought that
"screenreading" is a word?  It's two words, except that
it's a compound adjective in this case, so it should be
hyphenated.)

With a label like that, it seems to me that the tools are
hard-coded somewhere.  That capplet, at least, is found
inside control-center, but I don't know what module is
responsible for actually launching the screen reader.

> If there is a real world use case for why importing Gnopernicus settings
> is a necessity, however, we can look at importing them.
> 
> > How will her settings inter-operate with Gnopernicus if she
> > has multiple machines using the same home directory?  
> 
> The settings for the two are completely separate at the moment.  I'd
> really hesitate trying to combine them.  It could get rather ugly and
> might screw the user more easily than keeping them separate.

I wouldn't necessarily worry about Gnopernicus's and Orca's
settings.  What I'm worried about is if we have a GConf
setting under /desktop/gnome for which accessibility tools
to use, and how to launch them.  Selecting Orca on a system
with Orca could then seriously mess up an older system, if
we're not careful about the implementation.

This isn't necessarily something the Orca team needs to
concern itself with.  Rather, it's something we need to
deal with in whatever desktop modules glue this together.

--
Shaun