Re: Proposal: enable accessibility by default for GNOME



Willie Walker wrote:
Excellent discussion so far.  I'm going to write up a summary shortly.

Here's what I'm seeing from this good discussion:

PRIMARY ARGUMENTS AGAINST ENABLING A11Y BY DEFAULT:
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1) Performance. From recent tests, it does look like the ATK/GAIL peering can add significant memory overhead to each GTK+ app, and this will happen regardless of whether assistive technologies are used or not. This is a valid concern, especially if the overhead is as bad as my tests seem to indicate. :-(

2) Stability. Some people mention concerns about stability and have personal anecdotes about a11y seeming to make things crash. Others have personal anecdotes about a11y not causing any stability issues at all.

PRIMARY ARGUMENTS FOR ENABLING A11Y BY DEFAULT:
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1) It's easier for a person w/o disabilities to turn it off than it is for a person with disabilities to turn it on.

2) The a11y infrastructure can be used for more things than just a11y. Consider, for example, an on screen keyboard for devices w/o physical keyboards.

3) Better overall testing/usage coverage for all users. If a11y were enabled by default, we'd end up rooting out problems that developers might otherwise ignore or just be unaware of. That is, people with disabilities want just as much stability as people without disabilities, except they don't have the option of disabling accessibility. As the GNOME development community, I think it is our responsibility to work together to identify and fix stability issues. Even stronger, I find it unacceptable to say "my component has issues with a11y enabled, so I'm going to ignore a11y and just disable it. Let those crazy a11y pundits give me a patch if they want it so bad."

POSSIBLE WAYS FORWARD:
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1) Turn it on by default.

2) Keep it off by default. Re-evaluate the situation once the AT-SPI/D-Bus work is complete.

3) Keep it off by default. Provide some sort of best practices document for OS distributions to include some sort of "enable/customize accessibility" option as part of the installation process. This might also spill over into an "enable/customize accessibility" option in the users and groups administration tool.

4) Keep it off by default. Provide some sort of "refresh this session" support that keeps the user logged in, but basically kills everything on the desktop and restarts gnome-session. With this, users would have the similar "you must enable accessibility support" experience that they have today, but they wouldn't need to log out and log back in. Note also that this should probably be coupled with the user experience for selecting the automatic start of an assistive technology when the session starts.

5) Keep it off by default. Provide some sort of mechanism to start the at-spi-registryd and another for GTK+ to retroactively load/enable ATK/GAIL.

Does that seem to cover where we are so far?

Will


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