Re: Proposal: enable accessibility by default for GNOME

[Rob Taylor <rob taylor codethink co uk>]

Hmm, my take here is that the current AT-SPI is possibly a little too 
heavy to enable by default. I'd suggest we look at enabling a11y by 
default when the new AT-SPI DBus is ready (2.26 at current estimations)

I've cc'd Mark Doffman for his imput as he's probably got the most 
experience profiling current AT-SPI behaviour.

Rob

Willie Walker wrote:
> 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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--
Rob Taylor, Codethink Ltd. - http://codethink.co.uk