Re: Proposal: enable accessibility by default for GNOME

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

The way accessibility support works is that GTK+ loads accessibility 
modules (gail and atk-bridge) if it detects that accessibility support 
is enabled.

If accessibility support is not enabled when an application starts, I 
don't believe there is a way to indicate to a running GTK+ application 
to go ahead and load the accessibility modules retroactively.  As such, 
one needs to quit running applications and restart them in order for 
changes to the accessibility setting to take effect.

The current user experience is very bad and kind of a Catch 22 
situation: in order to enable accessibility, they often need to use 
assisitve technologies.  In order to use assisitve technologies, they 
often need accessibility enabled.  So, what we do now is tell users to 
find some way to enable accessibility for their session, then log out 
and log back in.  It's really embarrassing as far as I'm concerned.

I'll see if we can dig up some metrics on the costs of enabling a11y. 
If anyone has good suggestions for how to do this and how to get numbers 
that people will trust, I'd like to hear them.  :-)  Even if the numbers 
 are not favorable, however, I think I'd still argue to turn a11y on by 
default: it's far easier for someone without a disability to turn it off 
than it is for a person with a disability to turn it on.

Will

Mathias Hasselmann wrote:
> Am Mittwoch, den 30.07.2008, 13:11 -0400 schrieb Willie Walker:
> > Alexander Jones wrote:
> >  > Isn't this a distro decision?
> >
> > Ultimately, I guess the value for any gconf setting in 
> > schemas/desktop_gnome_interface.schemas can be whatever a distro wants 
> > it to be.  What I'm proposing, however, is that the default value that 
> > we choose for GNOME is that accessibility will be enabled by default. 
> > If distros want to revert this back to disabling accessibility, I guess 
> > it would be their choice.
>
> What is the motivation for enabling accessibility by default?
>
> For the regular user (not handicapped, not a testing engineer) the
> accessibility bridge just consumes resources without providing any
> benefit - AFAIKS.
>
> Why can't accessibility be activated on demand? With D-Bus activation
> we have the platform for enabling such features on demand.
>
> Ciao,
> Mathias
>
>
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